A Manga Coalition Is Formed
You may have read this news in Publishers Weekly already today: A coalition of Japanese and American publishers has been formed to deal with the growing (and rampant) problem of online manga distribution (commonly known as "scanlation"--scanning and translating manga works for online distribution). There are 36 Japanese publishers (all members of Japan's Digital Comic Association) joined by American companies Viz, Tokyopop, Square Enix, Vertical, the Tuttle-Mori Agency, and Yen Press. This will be a massive organization dedicated to tackling digital piracy of manga, a major effort to be undertaken by the publishing community.
-- John Hogan
This is terrible. These sites aren't harming anybody. I still buy alot of manga but their are some series that the american publishers just never finished translating and releasing. So, what, I'm doomed to never read the whole thing. The publishers better be willing to publish a whole series and not stop part way through if they are going to be doing this!