![](https://pic1.mangapicgallery.com/r/avatar/82/u162_50x50.jpg?2)
Sure, I myself buy them, and lately I'm avoiding reading the scanlations because I just prefer reading lots of them at the same time at this point, not much is happening :).
And that the people that couldn't have access to it anyway do indeed not affect the sales. But doing this for them isn't going to sell more copies either.
It's just that a lot of people that could actually buy them have the mentality in life that if they can get it for free, they won't buy. Those are the ones that might not necessarily really want a copy of their own at home, but would be more likely to if they didn't have the whole series for free online.
Because honestly, if I did not just love the French/Japanese glossy tankobon format that much, I wonder if I'd still buy them :/. In the end it's still mainly for selfish purposes, because you want that book badly, so can we really expect from everyone to buy a copy for the sole reason of supporting the artist? I think not xD.
![](https://pic1.mangapicgallery.com/r/avatar/65/u62020_50x50.jpg?2)
That defeats the point though, if you consider how far back the official release is, and them releasing after official release is like pissing on their cereal.
As for buying manga, I live with homophobic people so I can't afford to buy bl until i'm living on my own. Scanlations keep me up to date, I really appreciate them.
![](https://pic1.mangapicgallery.com/r/avatar/82/u162_50x50.jpg?2)
That still defeats the point, I doubt it's going to help sales in any way, some people might just wait for them xD.
Scanlations used to be made for small groups back in the day, so it wasn't problematic. Plus they were usually series that weren't published outside of Japan. But now with aggregators and all, way too much people have access to them. It seemingly did not stop scanlators and it's like now they're looking for an excuse :X.
I mean, here's what Sublime noticed:
"This is actually not true. We have already tested this theory with scanlations. We’ve released unscanlated titles from unknown mangaka and compared those sales to popular titles from well-known mangaka that WERE scanlated, and you know what we found? The unscanlated titles sold better. We are also not the only publisher who has done this and proven it to be true.
Let me also add in here some additional publisher knowledge. When a series is licensed, we know for a fact that the sale of each volume after volume one will sell less; this is called attrition. With each volume released of Love Pistols, sales decreased with each subsequent volume except for one. Do you know which one it was? Volume 7, the only volume in the series that had not been scanlated. In fact, it blew away any prior volumes’ sales numbers, which is completely unheard of. You even said it yourself, “I buy Love Pistols and I have to ask myself if Love Pistol’s was fully scanlated would I buy the digital copy?” This is why scanlations hurt the industry. Not just on digital titles, but on ALL titles, print or digital."
![](https://pic1.mangapicgallery.com/r/avatar/82/u162_50x50.jpg?2)
It's especially sad that when at convention people ask questions to the mangakas about stuff from volumes that still weren't released in their own language ^^'.
But yeah, IIRC were the way to share scanlations before, so you had to be tech savy and it was about as hard to do than going up and buying a copy. Now here it's obviously easier...
First off, it's not meant to be a critic or anything, I was just always wondering a bit about it and wanted to hear some opinions from others, maybe I'm missing something.
But I mean, if the goal of this scanlation (and seemingly most of them around here) is to expose the readers to the series and make them buy it if they have the means to, why is there a need to scanlate every single chapter? Wouldn't a given number of the first few ones be enough to expose it to people?
I don't know, it's just that it's the reason stated by the scanlators and it's puzzling me. Because I think that yes, scanlations could potentially be good to a series' sales, but I also think there can be such a thing as too much exposure. It just means people can read a whole series on the Internet and then jump on the next one without an after though, whereas if they could only read like volume 1 (or whatever is needed to figure you'll be likely to like what comes next) on the Internet and have to buy the rest, you get the exposure + being much more enticed to buy the other volumes if you liked it.
Anyway, at least it's good that there will be no more of that "it's mine" drama associated to the series.