VIZ shut down Mangastream

[sincere]

Some scanslation news. I figured this was relevant to our interests, so...

Dear MangaStream supporter,

It's with a heavy heart that I make the following announcement. MangaStream will no longer be releasing the following series:

- Naruto
- Bleach
- One Piece
- Hunter x Hunter
- Katekyo Hitman Reborn
- Claymore
- D.Gray-man

VIZ Media has demanded that we end our scanlation work for all of the above. This comes despite our best efforts to pursuade fans into supporting official distributors by being the only group to actively prevent an archive from forming on their website through the removal of chapters that are older than a couple weeks. They've succeeded in little more than invoking inconvenience to the community as their digital magazine missed the mark; it runs several issues behind and only features 3 of the above series. So long as their product continues to be slow, awkward and inferior to something a ragtag group of nobodies can churn out in a few hours - fans will continue to look to scanlation groups and aggregators for their weekly fix.

The aggressive and escalating nature of their threats have forced our hand into removing the content. MangaStream will no longer be posting full scanlations for any of the aforementioned series, we will instead focus our efforts onto the series we do that are not licensed by VIZ Media (you can assume everything currently on our directory will be continued). ((Source.))

There's more at the source, but I personally am pretty angry about this. Mangastream was a great resource, fast, and usually quality scans and translations. And they were absolutely no threat to Viz's publications, because they don't even keep an archive of their old scanslations -- their scans were deleted after a few chapters. How is that a threat to their tankoubon sales? Unless they plan to start releasing individual chapters within days of the Japanese chapter's release, I don't see how they're even selling a comparable product, especially when by the time their tank comes out, the Mangastream chapters have probably been gone for over a year.

Comments

[silvrguillotine]

Ack, this isn't good... That's where I went for DGM. Hard to keep up with even a mostly-dead fandom without keeping up with canon in a more or less timely manner.

[sincere]

100% agreed. The canon comes out really slowly as it is; how could you expect anyone to keep more than a passing interest in it if they can only put out new material once a year?

Maybe they think that's enough as long as people buy their books, but I think they'd be surprised at how much an active fandom helps book sales.

[silvrguillotine]

Exactly! Without things happening in this fandom (which is dead compared to the Good Old Days^TM, but still squeaking a little...) or getting relatively regular scanlations to keep it near the front of my mind, I entirely forget to check when new volumes come out.

It's not that they're completely in the wrong to stop scanlations, but sometimes, it seems like it would do less harm than they seem to think...

[taste_of_water]

I agree with everything you've said. Don't they understand that it's people like us who are already familiar with the original are the ones that promote it the most simply by mingling with fans in other fandoms?

Screwing us over is not going to increase their sales -_-

it's always such a hassle whenever things like this happens, do you have any idea of where else one might find scanlations?

[sincere]

There's always that, too. I don't buy things unless I've already seen them for myself and know I like them. I would never throw down $15 on a book just based on the description, or a movie that I don't already feel confident I'll like for one reason or another, or even more on a season of a TV series I haven't watched. Cutting off our routes to sample a series is just asking us to blindly have faith that everything you touch is awesome, and somehow I am confident that Viz has more things I'm not interested in than things I'm interested in (the two things).

I don't want to link to anything in particular, since the post is unlocked, but a quick Google search for "manga" turns up pretty much everything I was recommended!