Are you a regular reader of Onemanga.com? If so, you better hurry up and get your fill now because due to Manga publisher’s change of stance on scanlations, they made it clear that they no longer approve of it. So ends the run of free manga site for English readers.
Scanlations as they are called, is “the scanning, translation and editing of comics from a foreign language into a different language. Scanlation is done as an amateur work and is nearly always done without express permission from the copyright holder. The word scanlation is a portmanteau of scan and translation. The term is most often used for Japanese (manga), and occasionally for Korean (manhwa) and Chinese (manhua) comics. Scanlations may be viewed at websites or as sets of image files downloaded via the Internet.” — Wikipedia.
Upon visiting the Onemanga.com site, you are greeted with this popup:
“There is an end to everything, to good things as well.”
It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July 2010).
So what next? We’re not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear.
You can also show us some love in this moment of sadness by ‘liking’ our brand new Facebook page. It would be nice to see just how many of you came to enjoy our ‘better than peanut butter and jelly’ invention.
Regardless of whether you stay with us or not, on behalf of the One Manga team, I would like to thank you all for your unwavering support over the years. Through the ups and downs you have stuck with us, and that is what kept us going.
As a certain Porky was fond of saying… That’s all folks!
Time for me to go lay down and let this all sink in.
– Zabi
In these “hard economic times” it probably makes sense that publishers go after every single penny they can get. This reminds me of the time Dattebayo.com Fan Subs stopped subbing Naruto because it was to be streamed legally on stream sites like crunchyroll.com and hulu.com.
As we saw there, this did not stop the continued subbing or “pirating” of the anime. There will always be a group out there that is willing to sub/scanlate for the sake of doing it. There are various mediums like torrents and IRC. Maybe big publishers will take this opportunity to provide online digital manga for their audience like Marvel and DC have done. The market is certainly there.
For now, go get your fix while you still can.
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