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Shaenon Garrity: Right now, there aren't that many really strong "anchor titles" in manga — it's essentially Naruto and that's it. We're terrified about what will happen when Naruto ends. Like Tokyopop had Fruits Basket as an anchor title for many years and then it ended. VIZ had other titles like Inuyasha, which has also recently ended.

Publishers really need more big titles that readers can get excited about and that everybody wants to read, because these titles give us the money to publish the titles that are more niche and might get less attention — including titles that might appeal to older readers, stuff that would interest people who graduated from the popular teen titles.


Stephen Paul: I think we're at that point. In the past, there would have been this stable of potentially market-carrying titles that were not here yet that publishers would license for publication in the U.S. I think U.S. publishers have pretty much hit like the saturation point where all of those titles from Japan that would have the potential to be really successful in the United States are here already.

Shaenon Garrity: Yeah, definitely. Japanese publishers are looking around for the next big title as well.

Jonathan Tarbox: They're panicking just as much as the American print industry is.

GIVIN' IT AWAY FOR FREE: TRANSLATORS TALK BACK ABOUT SCANLATIONS

William Flanagan: I'm going to wade into this scanlation thing; the online free manga that fans view and put up on the Internet. What that has actually done is conditioned a lot of young people to think that manga is free.

Shaenon Garrity: Okay, I have a serious problem with this. I have a big problem with fans who think like this.

Honestly, I was just on the "Best and Worst Manga" panel, and I was talking about a lot of titles that are kind artsy or adult, or niche; they're not that big.

I used to do a column online where I talked about titles like this. I called it "The Overlooked Manga Festival."

I talked about classic manga and titles that maybe weren't all that popular, but deserved support. I always mentioned that these titles had been translated into English, and in fact I tried to feature titles had been translated fairly recently so readers could still find them.

I would say in my column, 'Such-and-such publisher put it out, there are X many volumes available, here's some sample pages.' Then I would always get comments from people saying, 'Oh, that looks kind of cool. Where can I download it?'

I'd end up saying, 'No! It's not for you to download. It's not a scanlated title. I just told you it's been published in the U.S., and that my scans of these pages is not from scanlations. I mean, this is available, go buy it, because it's notNaruto – it's a niche title that needs a lot of support, so it's not cool to steal it.'

Stephen Paul: But even if it wasNaruto, it would still be uncool for you to steal it.

Shaenon Garrity: That's true. But these little niche titles really need support if they're going to get published over here at all, or even get enough support to keep getting published in Japan. These people don't get it — they're really pretty clueless sometimes.

William Flanagan: Well the problem is, this has conditioned them — an entire generation pretty much — that manga isn't worth anything, or at least at the very most, it's worth a few commercials. That's not the way manga is sold. Manga is actually meant to be purchased as books and/or at least online with money. The only way that the manga industry can actually make money is to sell the manga because it's not a big enough market to support itself just from advertising on websites.

I mean, hell, most of the biggest online presences, the Facebooks and websites like that, are not making a profit through advertising. There is no way for manga companies, with their small audiences, to make the kind of profits necessary to sustain an entire business purely through advertising. On top of that, the thing that's affecting everybody here the fact that we are dealing with people who are giving away their work.

Jonathan Tarbox: And doing a much crappier job than we are, by the way.

William Flanagan: When you're a freelance translator like I am, and you charge for your services and the people you are charging to can probably pay even much less or not pay at all for the services you provide... They pay because they need to buy the rights, but when they can pay much less than what I need to charge for my work, then I'm finding it actually difficult to feed my family.

Jonathan Tarbox: People compare what we're going through now to what the music industry has had to deal with over the past few years. People started stealing music for free, and eventually, it more or less came down to the music industry finding ways to commercialize it.

But the big difference is, the musician still goes out and does concerts and you pay to get into the concerts. So the musicians tend to be a little more like "Oh, so what, so we don't make as much money of the records, but concert ticket receipts are actually going up." Well, that doesn't happen for manga. You either buy the books or you don't. And if you don't support the manga creators, they don't create stuff.

We don't really know how this whole digital thing is going to play out. None of us do. Nobody. Even the industry professionals don't know. But we do know it's definitely hurting.

Jason Thompson: I don't mean to be devil's advocate, but it's clear that it's not just manga scanlations that are making people used to getting free manga online, it's everything. People are used to getting all kinds of media for free online.

Nowadays, for many people, the idea of going to the store and buying a book or buying a DVD, or renting a DVD is just like a pain in the ass. It's just so much easier to go to Google or go to iTunes and buying the downloadable version instead of going all over town to find and try to buy something.

Jonathan Tarbox: We can't say that the people who are downloading the stuff are intrinsically evil, because if they can get it for free. I can't really blame them. But it does, nonetheless, affect us, as translators and editors.