Let’s talk about the biggest news this past week: manga companies both in the Japan and the US have formed a coalition (literally the word they use) to combat rampant piracy of manga. Their targets are not scanlators, but specifically those for-profit megasites which house thousands of titles for easy reading online, such as Onemanga.

The issue of scanlation sites profiting off of the manga they house is not very new to the scanlation scene, with Narutofan.com and its owner Tazmo getting accused of duping people into paying for a subscription service for something which was available for free elsewhere, albeit still illegally. This newer, ad-driven model exemplified by Onemanga however is something else entirely, and it preys upon its readers by feeding in to their desire for “more” in as convenient a way as possible.

I’ll admit it: I’ve used sites like Onemanga and Mangafox before. They’re absurdly convenient, and I don’t even have to use up space on my hard drive to take a look at a series. So while I wouldn’t mind seeing these sites go, I think there are lessons to learn from their successes.

1) There has to be a way to profit off of online manga.

The issue here is that these sites are “for-profit.” It’s clear that they’re able to generate revenue, so there must be something that companies can take away from them, even if it’s just the method of displaying advertisements.

2) Companies should work together to create a single portal for legal online manga

One of the strengths attributed to the giant manga aggregators is that they have practically everything, or at least significantly more than any individual manga company’s website. They have scanlations, they have just straight-up ripped copies from official English releases, and they have a ton of each.

To compete with this model, I think all the manga companies, like Viz, Yen Press, Del Rey, the Japanese companies backing them, and even this new Open Manga thing, need to pool together their resources and create their own, legitimate manga aggregator. Even if it’s just a link to their respective sites, I think it’d be a very good idea to just have a single place curious readers can go to in order to see what’s out there.

3) Increase awareness, make people know that resources exist

The for-profit aggregators reach well beyond the  “manga fandom.” The first time I heard of Onemanga, it wasn’t from people who were knee deep in anime and manga, but from people who kind of read it on the side. Conversely, when scans of Vertical Inc.’s release of Black Jack appeared, some fans stated that they wished the series was licensed, despite the fact that copyright pages were scanned, and that the covers prominently display Vertical logos and the like.

A lot of fans aren’t even aware of what’s out there, or even that a lot of manga series are online through their licensed distributors. So going along with the idea of a single and legitimate manga aggregator, the existence of such a site needs to get pushed and pushed hard, to the point that word of mouth happens not just in anime communities but on facebook or wherever.

I don’t even think the word  “legal” should necessarily be used either. That doesn’t really factor into anyone’s enjoyment of media, anime or otherwise.

4) Get a better manga-viewing platform

One of the big advantages of a site like Onemanga is that it encourages both rapid and rabid consumption of manga. Their simple linked jpeg viewer makes it easy to just click page after page; you can even use the arrows on your keyboard to move through a manga.

Official manga viewers however, such as Viz’s flash-based viewer on sites like Sigikki have a lot of little things which require more effort to navigate, in contrast with the near-brainlessness of Onemanga. Yes, it can be chalked up to the laziness of fans, but it shouldn’t be about admonishing the readership. Once again, lessons can be learned.

Taking the Viz manga reader again as an example, there are a number of small difficulties which add up and make the experience less enjoyable. I have a small resolution on my monitor and I know that, while this is getting less and less common, it is a problem for a good number of people. When the pages are zoomed out, the text is impossible to read. When it’s zoomed in, I have to use my mouse to pull the pages around, and can’t even use the scroll wheel on my mouse to navigate.

Then there’s the matter of moving to the next page. In zoomed-out mode you can go to the sides of the page and an arrow conveniently appears, but when zoomed in this no longer becomes an option, and you need to use the buttons at the bottom to move on. Not only that, but chapters don’t link to each other. You have to go back to the previous page, find the link to the next chapter, and then wait for that to open up in a new window. Compare this with being able to use the arrow keys to navigate, and being able to click the last page of chapter 1 to move onto the first page of chapter 2.

Conclusion

I understand that it would be difficult for companies to negotiate with each other to create unified website, but I think it’s better than going things alone. A “coalition” is one thing, but I want to really see manga companies working together.