Oh, great. The best part is that for some of these publishers there's literally no legal way to read their manga online.
Unless you think Japan and USA are the only 2 countries in the world, I guess...
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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For many mangas it also means that there exist no way to read them at all, for some are just not printed anymore
And some were not even translated at all.
Really smart move from the manga industry.
What are they even trying to achieve here?
It's not like there isn't a bunch of other websites hosting the same stuff...
Japan loves doing shit like this. I watch sumo and the sumo association has gotten so many youtube streams shut down, even when there was no official way to watch outside the country
unfortunately, Japan companies notoriously don't give a shit about earning money by making their fans (especially international fans) happy.
generally Japan companies' main motivation for fandom is to create niche one-off experiences in inconvenient locations at inconvenient times in a way that only Japan residents with lots of free time and disposable income can participate. because that makes those participants feel special and elite in an exclusive secret "ultra rich aristocratic" feeling club.
Japan society rarely gives residents the feeling of being special and valued in social groups or even family, so they feel strongly enough to spend and charge exorbitantly for the experience.
Shout out to Nintendo requiring to go to a store at certain dates to get special Pokémon which cannot be obtained any other way legitimately. Do they still do this shit?
The entire reason why there is a thriving global market for manga is that these off-books sites have existed for decades, and have raised a generation that treats manga as core culture. So they're strangling their continued relevance in a blind enforcement frenzy.
The other big problem of publishers acting this way is that if we start buying more manga after this, the message publishers get is that this works, and to do it again and again. They've created an incentive for manga fans to therefore not buy more manga for now. Which is exactly the opposite incentive publishers wish for.
Imo the other problem is even if you do decide to buy the manga in today's world nothing guarantees your possession of what you just bought. DRM and "only readable in publisher app" are the norm rather than the exception which creates a clusterfuck of a mosaic if you want to legally read the manga that are available that way. Comparatively MangaDex is a single centralised experience that is relatively complete.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" (Gabe Newell ~2011)
It can't cost 1 trillion yen if you don't sell it though.
Earlier this year Japanese lawmakers were shocked to realize that illegal consumption of manga cost the industry around 1 trillion yen.
Why do articles quoting shit like this never contextualize it?
I assume these numbers are, like they always are, a consumption = loss of buy equation, which is not a realistic calculation at all.
The article talks at length about accessibility, yet fails to point to that issue when quoting these "cost" numbers.
It's not like they're hosting any of those. It's not costing them anything. At most it should be labeled loss, but an equation makes no sense then either.
I wonder where the scanlation groups of affected manga are going to migrate to
There are plenty of other sites available. Unfortunately, none with the same volume of titles so you might have to use multiple sites.