Greetings Everyone,
It may come as no surprise to many of you that we are making a statement now, in response to Shueisha’s
recent appeal for RAW distribution of Manga to cease. There are many ways of trying to address this; all of which fall short to the simplicity of our decision.
MangaHelpers’ mission statement, as found on the bottom right of our main page, reads as follows:
Quote:
The goal of MangaHelpers is to provide you with accurate translations for the Manga that you love. In return, all that we ask for is that you show appreciation to those who help you get your "fix". Also, don't forget to help others in return - if you can! – njt
What we see happening on our website currently is an evolution of this statement in a direction that we don’t feel reflects our intentions; we wish to provide (localized) Manga to those who are incapable of obtaining it on their own through legitimate and cost effective ways.
Over the past year, we have seen website traffic originating out of Japan going directly into reading and downloading RAW scans. As a result of Shueisha’s recent public request, and as a result of (us) taking a look at our core values, we have decided that it’s time to go back to the basics that define us.
Therefore, MangaHelpers’ service will undergo the following changes, effective today:
- MangaHelpers will no longer be allowing uploads (neither MH hosted, nor externally linked) of RAW scans for the following publishers: Shueisha & Shogakukan. Existing RAW scans that belong to these publishers will no longer be available for any audience, regardless of country.
- Visitors residing within the country of Japan will no longer be able to access, read, or download, any RAW or Scanlation releases uploaded to the MangaHelpers database. This second change applies to all Manga publishers in our database.
We understand that this will affect a great deal of MangaHelpers’ visitors and traffic, as some 35% of our readers come from Japan, however; we also understand that availability of Manga within the Japanese isles is not a problem – neither due to price, nor actual physical distribution.
Lastly, we would like to make a point to address Shueisha directly in response to their public request:
We would like to apologize if we have caused the Mangaka that you represent any personal distress. Our intention, as stated above, has always been to spread the word and support of your stories and creative work; not to harm those who are creatively gifted in ways most of us could only dream about.
In closing, we will try our best to work with all publishers on any request you may have in the future in order to best benefit all your global fans; even if that should be a request to remove content from our site.
Respectfully,
MangaHelpers.com Administration
Well can you atleast make a list of manga's under those publishers which have been removed from the MH so that me & some people would know what exactly are the mangas that got taken out (since i think not all people know what Publisher releases which mangas).
Also would this effect the translations & scanlations released/available on the site for those manga's as well.
This only affects RAW scans, not Scanlations, for the international audience. It also affects Scanlations for Japanese visitors only.
Translations are still available for all publishers, including Kodansha, as they do not contain any scanned material.
Where can I get my One Piece & Naruto from now on?
anyway i know that is a ONLINEE READER TOO...
so wtf! the scanlators put a link to they site before the
online view........ i hate that so mh can change these rule ?
Greetings :D
'anyway, I have a suggestion...
If it's possible, can you please remove all the titles (series) on the list that is under Shueisha & Shogakukan...
there's no point having them listed here anyway... it will just make the site look messy...
and also the translations for those series...
And just the day I need some panel from chapter 3, now I'll have to scan it. T_T
Edit: I should have known better and download all the raw I needed.
Anyway, thank you all for the raw service while it lasted, it was nice to have it all a few click away. ^_^
But I wanna know how the scanlators and translators are gonna find their RAWs to do their work from now on... =(
Banning the japanese IPs would have been enough.
Translations are still available for all publishers, including Kodansha, as they do not contain any scanned material. "
But this is somewhat paradox. What it means is that scanlations sooner or later will be removed as well, and the only thing which MH will provide will be - as stated - translations.. translations only.
Sad? This is Mangahelpers administration.
btw. by all means I'm not insluting anybody, I just remembered that "famous letter" from some time ago.
Is it okay for me to start spamming a particular website URL? >__o
This way only who actually should have access to it will be the ones doing it...
If there was a tutorial on where the best places to get the upto date raws was available I would use IRC more often but I am lost on it without one the same goes for emule and other ways of getting raws otherwise I would have long since broadened my manga reading list there are quite a few I cant find raws for
Where are the best places for upto date scans on IRC?
Thank you
While I don't care (at all) about either of these publishers, how the hell is this progress?
thank god we still have Rena and Vics
The golden age of scanlations is coming to an end...
Haha, reminds me of the good old times. Thankfully I'm an old time scanlator so I'm pretty much an IRC veteran. We had to get everything from the scanlation groups IRC channels or find download links from there.
@rmdichos
I don't think that actually works. It defeats MH's purpose, which are translations. Besides, scanlations are still allowed to be uploaded. This only affects Raws at the moment. It's not as if you're not going to get translations nor scanlations anymore. They are still available on the site (except Kodansha for scanlations). You just need to work extra hard and know where to look to get your Raws, if you want them that is.
@MH admins
It mentions visitors. Does that mean it doesn't affect members? :o
One (of at least a dozen) raw website's cessation of distribution of raws from two publishers is hardly the end of scanlation.
It means anyone browsing this website from within Japan, member or anon alike :) Hope that clarifies a little!
>__o
Then what about the translators? As I am aware, some of the translators that post translations at MH live in Japan O_o...
Edit: Oh wait...I think I might have misunderstood. It's only the Raws and Scanlation pages doh. But what about the stuff that some t/lers are already doing but are not Kodansha, Shueisha nor Shogakukan...hm. I guess that means they have to get their raws from an external source (other sites or via PMs or whatever) or buy the magazine or tankoubon.
If the magazine was release yesterday why the scanlations are hidden ?..
Greetings :D
@unok-kun
NOOOOOOOO, The real scanlators are coming up!...
the Mangastream"Scanlators(People that use their cleans)" are coming down ? xD...
They can still [post, read, browse] all translations by all translators. They simply need to find the "source" of their translations from other places ;)
But then I can still see the releases... >__>
What about my question? Why not do allow only translators and scanlators to get these RAWs on the website?
Do you guys consider doing it? Or there is a reason you think it goes against MH's goal?
This is progress because it respects the publisher's and the mangaka's will, which quite frankly, i find most sites lacking it.
When AnimeSuki stopped releasing "licensed (in U.S. only)" animes, lots of people complained about it, however, today no one cares. Because there are a lot of ways to download the animes you want.
There are a lot of ways to get raws too:
Http, Ftp, IRC, P2P, Torrent, Forums, MegaUpload, MediaFire and etcetera.
I congratulate MangaHelpers for respecting the people who make what we love, and in doing so, making they realize we do this out of profound respect, and not out of inspite or wharever other reason.
Don't forget the most important thing when scanlating:
From fans, to fans, by fans.
from fans,to fans, by fans for the money cool :D
My focus is in this range of raws, then I will continue offering the raws I'm working. =)
About the downloads for the Japanese, read what I wrote on my site (forum topic -- This is referring to raws I offer.). It is a good solution. XD
Oh crap. >.<"
Guess I'll be coming to your IRC channel for RAWS, Rena-chan. ^^
^___^
Please look at the big picture rather than our community. In a sense it is progression towards keeping people in Japan from being leaked the weekly raws at an earlier rate. It surely seems detrimental to their business if people in Japan are viewing the manga raws online 5 or so days and end up not buying the magazine because of it since it's released at a later time.
If this move provides even a slight increase in the sales of these issues, then we can consider it progress.
@Alfanubis
Marvel and DC don't have their comics leaked in their original formats days before they're released in America.
Anyway, Rena-chan and Vic's raws will all be on their irc channel, and irc isn't difficult to use either. Though it won't encompass all of the raws, it's does take care of most of them so I don't see why people are against this move. Very little has changed, you just have to change your method of seeking raws.
I think it kinda the same cause if the Raw distribution cease that mean there will be less scanlations
That's because they do not adopt attractive publications on the Internet. That the FlexComic performs well with Yahoo, they make money from ads on the site and printed volumes. Today only collectors like to have a printed volume, not everyone can collect as many volumes as soon as you need the big publishers seek new ways to make money, a new business model.
Because the problem here is Japanese people being able to read the chapters like a week before release. Shueisha and co really don't care about international scans that much because most of their international stuff is dealt with by American companies like Viz. Kodansha only came down on it because they plan on expanding internationally themselves.
Like everyone says the raws still won't be that hard to get at, but what would be interesting would be having Japanese scanlators springing up to reverse scan English translations :P.
After that announcement in WSJ magazine and posture of the editorials to ensure their bussiness (sincerely, japanese people attitude was pretty naive).
Well, I'm agree with point 2. People from Japan that have all the possibilities to buy the magazine don't have to leech anything here.
Edit: Thanks Vic ^^
amazing vic!!.. like here say ;
this man have BALLS!!!!!! jajajaja
Thx again :D
This is all going to adversely affect the discovery of new, untranslated series. Just last week I found a Shueisha series to translate by seeing it in the shout-outs and checking out the raws here on MH. The manga is a genre I don't normally like, so I wouldn't have hunted down the raws if they weren't easily available.
One compromise (which I doubt we'll get, since MH just folds to whatever the publishers demand,) would be to allow the first volume or two, or the first several chapters of a series to be hosted. A free sample, so to speak. That would be beneficial in Japan as well as the rest of the world. Another compromise would be to host only raws which are several months old.
I am of the opinion of banning the jap ip and keeping the raws. The point is to restrict acces of the japanese public to the raws (and by the way, u dont get the raws 1 week available here, its was only on that other case).
....
thanks Rena-Chan ! xD
And some of you are retarded for trying to give methods of gaining access to exactly what they're trying to get rid of in the same very announcement. Have some fucking decency.
Let's see, if there can be no RAWs, how could the Japanese people need to upload? (unless it's for some of those random not-known-at-all publishers) And do you even think it's the Japanese who do the scanlations? *laughs his ass off*
Some groups have raw providers of their own, that only share their raws with those groups. The regular raw providers for free use will keep scanning, just not uploading the raws here (you'll need to know how to search for them). So you'll get your fix, don't worry about that.
Yah, so many leechers getting angry for removing something that most can't read...
If you think that raws being uploaded on English sites affects sales of Japanese magazines and volumes, you are mistaken.
Anyway, it's not like it affects me at either way, I get all my raws from p2p programs.
@fg7dragon
Raws are usually not uploaded by the Japanese, they are uploaded by users that receive them from Japanese p2p networks.
I totally agree with you and I hope that if we have somehow hurt mangakas' feelings this will be helpful.
Once again, thank's for your hard work.
(@cloneofsnake and others)
FYI, there are still people who scans them themselves and share them for free use, such as Vicissitude and Rena Chan. Not everything's from p2p networks.
How can you honestly say that, if you've checked around it's been said multiple times that a good portion of the traffic here is from Japan. So it can be assumed that they use this site to get access to raws since they come out before they're supposed to. If the entire magazine is made available online, it makes one less likely to buy the entire magazine if it comes out days later, so for better or for worse we have to assume the worst here as Shuiesha did send out that editorial letter. While we were probably not the main problem, I don't think we were helping.
Keep movin guys! "the scanlator's need you ^_^"
this news will make mangastream more powerfull!!
and no one can beat them... "but i love them... hehehehe"
lol WIN!!
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
IM SO PISSED NOW!!!
i HATE reading in english, thats y i loved this site because here got loooooots of japanese RAWs!!!!
reading in english and reading in japanese are totally different thing....
even the translators are doing their best to translate as close as possible but....
UUUUGGGGHH YYYYY???? :(
n those 2 are the most i read!!!
i was in process of reading Conan but i cant anymore.... :(
i understand the goal but.....
i still dont like how it changed!
Even if you don't know where to look, there is this thing called a "PM". If you PM the relevant people, you can also find out where to get raws!
I see why the japanese ips should be blocked but it does slow down translators as well.Especially since the raws are now not as easily accessible now.Most of the time,when I decide to do a series,its because I happened to read the raws on MH.
I know how to use p2p and irc but its just not the same somehow.
sorry for my poor english xD...
but what u think ?
https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AbXys-WYREuTZGc3N2Y5MzhfMTJkd3prNXFmdw&hl=en
xD... is a minituto xD...
Greetings :D
Everyone else: Pay up and buy the sources. They're not that expensive with SAL shipping. Or learn the other illegal ways to get your fix. Just don't whine here. I doubt the admins will bend.
But yeah, golden age = ovar.
It also spells the end for much less popular manga series, some of which I enjoyed reading so much... Well, crap, what else is there to say.
The only reason I still visited MH was because it had a lot of Japanese raws in an Online Reader format (a godsend for people with slow Internet connections like myself) that I could glean over and practice on, but now it seems I can't even do that as well.
Oh well, good bye forever, MH~
On the other hand, there are a lot of other places one can find Raws from so it really is no biggie ^^
Google is your friend.
Haha...nice tutorial...but some of the screenshots are blocking the text(?) and yeah, I see bad English there >__o
"What will happen with NJT? He's in Japan so it'll be hard for him to not be able to see any raws or scanalations at all and still run the site."
on my comment from before...but it doesn't seem to be there anymore. Or maybe it didn't publish. XD
@KalyaHawk
"For the people in Japan...this doesn't affect the scanlations, I thought, so why are there complaints about that? And also, if you really want the raws, it's not that hard to dish out like five bucks for the actual solid copy. Or borrow it from a friend. I mean, isn't that really what "living close to the actual source" means??"
It's different for everyone. For example, I may be in Japan, but I'm currently in a tiny, rural town in the middle of Hokkaido. I don't even think they sell manga here. XD
Plus, I'm currently working full time everyday just for food and board so I can save money... I couldn't keep spending money each week on raws.
Those, however, are just me. I'm sure others who live here can buy the raws quite easily. But the main thing is- I'm an Australian. English is my natural language, and I want to read manga in English. A scanlated chapter takes me 10 mins to read but it takes me like 2 hours to read one in Japanese, and I have to use a dictionary all the time. It's a massive pain in the ass. So I can understand why some people are upset about not being able to read scans on MH anymore. ^^
(Although really, I see no reason why they can't just go somewhere else for it instead of complaining here. :3)
BTW I am not from Japan.
If One Piece was published weekly in my country (Chile... yeah, that's never gonna happen xD), I will paid by each chapter of manga. We don't even have the anime!! So the manga is completely discarded :(
Now, the only thing that worries me is that maybe the scanlations will take longer to be released, I think it will be harder to get the RAW to work on them.
Unfortunatly not all series are on IRC :s I Think to stop the scanlation of Darker Than Black Shikkoku no Hana because I can't find the raws ^^
Or better yet why cant just Kodansha, Shueisha & Shogakukan start selling their magazine in other countries??
hmmm what should i do ...sotp reading weekly raw and begin read scanlations..or wait for a month to read raw book version T_T...i'm so sad today
The scanlations for Darker than BLACK - Shikkoku no Hana are not going to stop. I heard from one of the admins of Simple Scans that they managed to get a raw provider.
If you're from another group, unless you managed to get your own raw provider, tough luck, otherwise you need to try and learn Share, Perfect Dark, Winny to see if anything is available...not everything can be found on IRC unfortunately, it's the same with P2P programs, not everything can be found on Share/Perfect Dark/Winny either. It's a fact. It's something you can't do anything about.
I promise not to complain one whit if you can tell me how I can subscribe in the US to the Young Animal Bi-weekly that has several of the series I read. So far I haven't been able to find any service that will send anything that is more frequent than monthly.
In fact, if you ask ME (and I know no one is), if MH could work with the publishers to find a way to let me buy the raws in a digital format directly from here on the day of publication, I would happily put a good bit of money where my mouth is.
PS. Shame MH was a good site, everyone is becoming a double faced, If you are doing this don't hide it be a man and do it with a style. You knew what were you doing.
PSS. Bu-hu mangaka feel's hurt.... I'm going to buy them a lolipop
I hate this. I want the raws back!! It's to compensate homesickness! PLEASE SOMEONE GIVE THE RAWS BACKKKK!!! (ナルト読みてぇ〜！！！）
So ok too stop scanlation and all the activity linked, But the Japanese publishing house should propose us an alternative. It is because we can't have the same services that you scanlator, cleaners exists (and I deeply thank you!).
Actually, I never really read Shueisha or Shogakukan, although a LIST definitely would help.
Basically, figure out how to get raws on IRC or try out some differen't manga. There are TONS of titles still available. I use this site to help study Japanese, so this site is still THE ABSOLUTE BEST SITE for this purpose.
Keep on truckin', MH!
Naruto, One piece, Bleach, all have teams with their own raw providers. But what about mangas like Nurarihyon dependent on translators/scanlation teams finding the raws here?
Those mangas are most likely dead from now on...
A real shame :-(.
I'm a Japanese living in the US, so now I have to go scrape the internet to find the RAWs... :(
I was happy to read raw manga @Mangahelpers.com.
Because I can not buy raw manga around my house in US.
I understand what Japanese publisher said.
I still come to Mangahelpers.com to read Japanese raw even if I pay $5~10$ per month.
What do you think?
where can I read Yamigarishi Kimaira Tenryuuhen ?
njt was the only uploader for this manga !!
Or does this only apply to raws? Either way I don't read scanlations, only raws.
Keep on truckin', MH!
@kakashigirl would pay that for reading a manga online and a damn nice idea, but a bit cheap if u can read all of em for 5-10$ :P But respekt the desision and a big thanks too all the dudes that upploaded Raw and translations to this point! Big Thanks!! i still love MangaHelpers!!
------
Cause people still post translations so ppl can use them for scans/read them?
No, translators sections are not restricted to Japanese visitors :]
I'm impressed. :)
I would love to buy my manga, but living in northern Sweden....well the earliest I can get manga is if I buy it from the U.K or Germany....but I can't read German...and the U.K....they are as fast as Sweden when it comes to releases. really slow..well I think they are catching up in the volumes thou, bought volume 51 recently, volume 52 releases in June. but then when we catch up it will be back to wait for months before next release if this weekly scanlation service wasn't available :)
But I think the existence of such a sight proves there is a demand for manga in digital format, in both translated and non-translated forms. So what we have are Japanese publishers who are doing somewhat the same thing as the record companies in the mid-90s: fighting technology instead of creating a viable business model to use it to their advantage. Because frankly, I would be willing to pay for the manga I want to read. But I don't want to import a gigantic phonebook of manga every month, both for the space and the cost, nor do I care to buy 300 volumes of manga I have nowhere to put.
I understand why the publishers would want raw distribution stopped, especially in Japan (and really, why would you download manga in Japan when you can walk into any Book Off and buy a volume of any series for 105 yen, or pay a few hundred en and sit at net cafe and read hours worth.). I don't understand why they wouldn't tap into a worldwide market for digital manga with untapped economic potential, not to mention the good press of releasing "green editions," saving environmental as well as printing costs. Even working with Mangahelpers, charging royalties, would have been a better solution than simply yanking them out of the hands of fans without providing a paying alternative.