By AnimeEv 1 month, 1 week ago
The following goodbye message has been posted on the front page of popular online scanlation site OneManga.com for awhile:
“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
Queue fan reaction:
(Just kidding)
But with all of this re-organization, such as the Yen Press launch of a digital distribution system and the DMP project to re-orient and re-structure digital manga distribution, you’ve got to agree that the times are indeed changing. But where does it leave us as fans? Can we expect translations of less popular series? Maybe a few, but not all? Chunks? Bits? Does this mean, as I’m predicting here and now, that tech-savvy fans will go back “underground” to direct distribution routes such as file-sharing via IRC?
I’m an anomaly as far as fans go. I like old, washed-out, weird series about ennui and emotional despondency. I’m currently preparing write-ups for Fist of the North Star and the relatively recent VOTOMS film, which are hardly doing Occult Academy numbers on the torrent side o’ thangs. The point being is that I am well aware that my tastes are not en vogue or popular, and hey, I like Lucky Star and Gurren Lagann a ton as well, but I would turn to sites like OneManga for direct research on new series when something made me make a confused Scooby Doo face.
But I couldn’t delude myself: going to OneManga was a privilege that I knew wouldn’t last. Law of averages.
It was a great journalistic crutch as well as an obviously rad entertainment hub, but I’m sure that their days were numbered from the instant they pointed the DNS records on their server to that name: it was too great a risk, and there were too many conglomerates in too many places who had too many lawyers on retainer to let such a resource hang out there like the Fonz, beckoning us all with the coolest of hand gestures.
Do I think it was a legal threat that caused the site to withdraw its files? Well, um, duh. But that doesn’t bother me. It’s the nature of a beast. Just as plants participate in photosynthesis, companies protect their property. The big question is, to me, far more about the overall thrust of fandom. Are we back at square one? Or are we heading over to see what Square is now offering digitally at their site? Have we reached a happy medium for digital distro that makes everybody happy?
Will it work out?
onemanga
