Posted as a popup on the front page, or in the forums:
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 ’10).
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.
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 the forums, he also explains that 1000Manga, which they created for the more mature stuff, is also going away.
I can’t say as I’m surprised; I’m sure that manga scanlations are eating into the corporate profits. Unfortunately, in my case that pretty much means I’m out of the manga reading gig (assuming MangaFox and others are also forced to shut down). Short of torrents, I won’t have access, and I can’t support the Manga industry in the US.
It’s not that I don’t want to; in particular, I’ve felt bad about not buying Negima books just to support the author and industry. Unfortunately, I will not buy something I cannot use, and the text in the small-book format used by American manga importers is too damn tiny for me to read without a magnifying glass, something I just refuse to do. Gasses aren’t enough. Negima is a particularly bad offender, even on a large monitor I find myself having to load pages into a graphics program and zoom in to catch some of the text.
I was hoping that OM might be able to ride the storm by doing a CrunchyRoll type deal, especially to carry the stuff that doesn’t get released commercially in the US. Sure, they’d be forced to lose the big three (OP, Naruto, Bleach), and probably other highly popular titles, like Negima, but there’s a lot of marginal stuff that isn’t commercially viable for printing that they could work with. Either the site owners weren’t allowed that route, couldn’t take advantage of it, or didn’t want to.
Given the amount of anime that comes from manga (Sekirei, Negima, OP, Naruto, FMA, Bleach, etc.), this is also going to have a negative effect on the anime market. Some very popular series will still break through, but for most, there will be far less word of mouth ahead of time. Who would have cared about HOTD ahead of time, if not for the manga scanlations?
I’m not going to rant about corporate greed, or try to excuse getting something for nothing. It’s just the way things are, and I’m sad to see OM bite the dust, if for no other reason than my ability to get timely Negima updates.
Update: 91,000 Facebook “likes” and 77 pages of comments and counting. Publishers take note.
Once the coalition of manga producers announced that they were going to hunt down pirates and shoot to kill, it was pretty much inevitable that oneManga was going to go the way of the dinosaurs. They were clearly one of the big-11 (I think it was) that the coalition said were their main targets.
One can ask, though, who cares if anyone cares about HSotD beforehand? It’s not like we’re living in an information wasteland; people can find out about new shows without already having read 20 volumes of the manga.
It’s like the people who claim that, without Naruto fansubs, nobody would have known that Naruto would have sold well over here. Personally, the way I figure it, anyone who DIDN’T know that it would sell well over here, and who works for an anime company, should have been shot. ;p If anything, the opposite is more of a problem – shows which did pretty well as fansubs but then hit the market like a lead balloon, because they’re not things with much rewatch value and -the whole marketplace- already watched ’em.
Not much you can do if your vision is going, though. I’ll just have to get more manga to make up your share!
“The prosecution would like to enter into evidence… the last three letters of the defendant’s moniker. ”
Some folks need all the help they can get. Apparently John Ledford was one of them.
You can ddl directly from the scanalators at Baka-Updates: http://www.mangaupdates.com/whatsnew.html
If only you knew how right you were…
It was when I realized that I already owned everything that I had any interest in from the ADV catalog that I went, “Oh, that explains it.”
In his defense (and that’s not usually something I say), it’s not like Naruto was seriously shopped around to other companies, any more than Bandai shops around Gundam titles.