One Manga Shut Down by Manga Publishers

A coalition of manga publishers have successfully forced top manga piracy site One Manga offline for good.

The site’s administration posted a statement detailing their decision:

It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it.

We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site.

It probably comes as news to manga publishers to hear that they “approved” of scanlations in the first place, although the rise of P2P-based scanlation was most probably directly responsible for the medium’s huge growth in international popularity in recent years.

Publishers for their part have stated they are under no illusions about the impossibility of stamping out piracy completely, but that commercial sites hosting vast amounts of scanlated manga simply tip the balance of convenience too far in favour of free and online.

Whether they have the good business sense to now offer a superior legal alternative, or instead cling to the delusion that scanlated copies will translate one to one, or even a hundred to one, into paper copies, will likely determine the prospects of the international manga market for some time to come.