OneManga shutting down

[Bob Schroeck]

If all the free scanlations of Negima (or whatever) dried up tomorrow would you stop purchasing the official releases?

No, because I'm well and truly hooked.  But the question is, would the publisher have gotten my money without the scanlations' existence?  Nope.  I never would have bothered looking at it on the shelf (because I rarely check out manga on the shelf).  But because I got a chance to get involved in the story via the fansites, I've ended up spending no less than $250 so far on the extant volumes, and plan to continue buying.  And if the publisher can't work out the ROI there, well, that's their problem.

Let's
accept the premise that the free scanlation sold you on Manga X
(Negima, FMA, whatever) like has been brought up in this thread. Okay,
you're sold now. You like Manga X enough to purchase the official
releases. Why are you continuing to read the scanlations?
The official releases are coming out because you are buying them. Would
you stop buying the official releases because you couldn't read the
latest scanlations?

Because I don't want to wait a year or more when I can have the latest stuff now.  I'll gladly pay for it -- and read it again -- when it gets to North America, but I want to know now how they get out of the Lotus Eater Machine, for example.  If I have to, I'll wait, but if I have the option, I'll take it.  The publisher gets my money either way.

Learn Japanese then?

How convenient that I've lost my job and I can now devote my all time to learning one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to acquire, so that I may have the moral high ground with which to enjoy my mass-produced foreign pop culture.
Sorry, Epsilon, but you make it sound like it's just a quick afternoon's study and a little effort later that evening and Shazam! Instant mastery.  No.  I know people who've got degrees in Japanese who struggle with some of the stuff in manga.  Remember that we're talking about entertainment here.  Once it becomes a chore, it stops being entertainment.

And why do you have the right to follow it immediatly?

What a curiously arrogant question.  Would I have the right to follow it immediately if I were borrowing a copy from a library?  I mean, it's functionally the same -- one entity buys a single copy and makes it available to a theoretically unlimited number of other readers.  (And before you object that the two are not the same, allow me to point out that there are -- admittedly extreme -- elements in the publishing industry who, following the model of the RIAA, gripe audibly that lending libraries are piracy, pure and simple, and should be somehow regulated or controlled so as to prevent/recover lost revenue.)

People
in these arguments always post their anecdotal evidence as if it means
something. It doesn't. You are one person, and the fact that (according
to you, who have a vested interest in believing that way) you bought
more anime/manga/video games/music/whatever due to piracy means
absolutely jack squat.

It's a curious thing... in large quantities anecdotal evidence becomes somehow ennobled and becomes marketing data...

In the real world market, piracy decreases sales
overall. This is readily observable by looking at markets (for
instance, software in China) where copyright is not respected at all -
legitimate sales collapse completely, and only software that can't be
run without legitimate copies (notably MMORPGs) sell in quantity. I'll
take the evidence of a billion people over your bookshelf (and China is
hardly the only example), and so will anybody who aspires to discuss
the topic with intellectual honesty.

You will, of course, have to find honest and verified statistics about losses first... as multiple threads (with linked references) over in Politics have shown in the past, just about every financial claim about the "cost" of piracy has turned out to be at the very least grossly exaggerated and at worst completely fabricated by industries that have a vested interest in a two-hundred-year-old distribution system.
And I think Sweno's counterarguments are sufficient to the task beyond that.
And let me just remind everyone that yes, I am a published author, and yes, for every "pirate" copy of one of my works out there I have theoretically been robbed of anywhere from 25 to 50 cents -- assuming said pirate would have ever bought a copy in the first place.  Even so, I can smell the bullshit as it wafts from the office towers in NY and LA.

Epsilon wrote:

I have seen
evidence where available fansubs decreased the marketability of an
anime: the original Negima anime series flopped in the states because so
many people had downloaded the fansubs and decided it was crap.

I
don't understand. I followed you to the point where you said people
will like a series on its own merits if it is good, but then you said
that because people didn't like the Negima fansub, the sales for it
suffered. So from what I understand if lots of people buy an anime
title then its good, but has nothing to do with the fansub people
watched. But when sales drop like a rock, then its must be the fansub's
fault. Somehow.

Wengfook's got the right of it there, Epsilon. What you've written reads suspiciously like "heads I win, tails you lose".
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.