This is from a few days ago (6/17/10) over a month ago now and might be old news to some of you, but I feel like this is important.

Japanese, U.S. Manga Publishers Unite To Fight Scanlations

Summary: They’re shutting you down man!

Japanese and American publishers are teaming up to shut down the large manga scanlation aggregation sites. The push is coming primarily from the Japanese publishers. It is entirely in their interest to do so and they have the right to regulate their material. Despite the insipid beginnings of scanlating, recent development has made it easier to distribute scanlations – there are even viewing apps for any number of smart phones – with sites like One Manga and MangaFox becoming some of the top visited sites on the web. Obviously manga is more popular than ever, but the sales of official publications has actually gone down. It’s about time someone took action.

Update:

As you can tell, I suck at updating this site. Since it looks like all this stuff is going down now I figured I should at least mention it. One Manga and some other large manga scanlation sites are shutting down this week beginning this week.

For some reason this is all seems to be going down with hardly a bang. Guess those aggregation sites aren’t that crucial after all.

I’ve been asked to allow Beru Bara Kids to be posted on those large sites but always refused. There are many reasons for this. Formatting and quality differences when dealing with most large manga hosting sites were originally a big part of it. I thought long and hard about this, and was even sweet-talked a bit about how nice it would be to have Bijou Blade’s scanlations hosted on another site, but I still cannot get the gross taste out of my mouth when I think about someone making $$$ – advertising revenue and whatnot – from free scans. I never frequent those sites because they have no right to make money from my reading manga and at the expense of the official license holders.

Guess I don’t need to worry about that anymore, eh? Although it is unclear how this will affect independent scanlators since they just seem to be going after the aggregators. I’ll just sit back for a bit and watch what happens next, thanks.

(edits from my original post are in italics)