OneManga shutting down

[Epsilon]

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.

Why do you get to make this decision for them? And you can't say you never would have been interested. You're making assumptions about a hypothetical. What if (ublisher of Negima) offered the first, say, three volumes for download? First ten? It's happened with series here in the US before.

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.

Why do you have to read the manga scanlations to do that. I can find spoilers for series without ever going to a scanlation site. I follow Bleach and Fairy Tail up to current releases without once downloading a scanlation.

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 similarly, why does it matter if a company doens't want you illegally downloading their work. It's just entertainment. What does it matter if you have to wait six months for the next chapter? It's not like reading the latest issue of Negima will magically give you a job, or failure to do so will cause you to die of cancer.

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.)

Libraries are legal means of getting access to material. And frankly, I'm not the RIAA so stop ascribing the arguments of the RIAA to me. And i find the argument that you shoudl have free unlimited access to anything you damn well please arrogant in the extreme.
I'll remember that next time I have the opportunity to download one of your books, or pay for it.

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...

Sceintific surveys are different from anecdotal evidence for reason you are too smart not to already know, Bob.

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.

I suggest you look up information about the software industry in China and Taiwan.

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".

He asked for a case where availablity of fansubs killed a market. Negima the anime is one of those. Whether it desrved to tank or not is beside the point. Fansubs can hurt a market, via poor word of mouth, just as easily as they can help a market. It's a wash.
Frankly, I find the idea that extremely popular series like Haruhi are successful solely because of fansubs really unsupportable. The fact such series were popular in Japan probably has more to do with why it was popular over hear as well. Unless you are going to claim that fansubs are responsible for the success of Haruhi in Japan?
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Epsilon