Did manga bootleggers spread bad habits to Japan?
Roland Kelts has an interesting article in the Daily Yomiuri covering manga’s summer of discontent, and one point he touches on is the decline in manga sales in Japan—yes, it’s happening over there as well as over here. And one cause that the people he is talking to point to is the rise of scanlation in the U.S. Originally, scanlations were done by small groups and available only by download, so the audience was limited. Now, bootleg sites like the recently retired OneManga.com offer fan translations of the latest chapters of popular manga such as Naruto and Bleach, as well as scanlations of less popular titles and scans of manga published in the U.S. Here’s where it gets interesting: Over dinner in Tokyo this May, a Kodansha editor suggested that the real damage posed by scanlations over the past three to four years was the direct result of manga uploads spiking in Japan. “Before, it was mostly non-Japanese kids posting and translating manga. But the kids in Japan caught on, and now a
