OneManga closing

I'm sure most of you have already heard, but OneManga is closing down.

I'm definitely bummed, since I used to read a lot of manga there.

Fortunately, there's other sites, but I don't know how long they will be up.

Why are they closing (this is news to me)? I'm assuming legal troubles?

It's a shame. They had the best translations out of the major manga sites.

Yeah, if you go to the site it has a little pop-up thing talking about it.

I guess it has something to do with the publishers crackdown on scanlations that has been going on recently.

Publishers are cracking down on the free to read sites, not the scanlators. Sites like MangaFox and OneManga are high priority for them. When Scanlations first took off publishers watched carefully to see how much it was going to hurt sales. Turns out scanlations helped. Some people would download and read the manga on their computers, talk about it with their friends and get them excited, then they'd go buy the manga when it released here.

When the free to read sites started showing up the effect was the opposite. Now the people who refused to download the manga for various reasons(most are just too scared of viruses to risk it) could to go to a safe site and read the manga without having to download it. The other reason they're cracking down on the free to read sites is because unlike (most)scanlators, mangafox and onemanga make money every time you visit. The sites host ads people pay to have displayed there, making them money off of work other people did.

I had heard about the publishers crack down on these sites a couple months ago and honestly, I was hoping MangaFox would be the first to go. The mods and admins there pissed me off. First they used ads that had sound clips (2 per page) that were really annoying, would overlap, and just make it hard to concentrate on what you were trying to read. Second they used a program by google for their ads and when someone brought to attention the mature content the ads were placed with to the companies the ads were promoting MangaFox quickly got rid of most of their mature content. Now I wouldn't have been pissed by this if it had been for any other reason than the fact that google was going to pull to their services and thus MangaFox lose it's ads and money.

Anyways, long story short, scanlators are safe by my understanding. It's just the free to read sites we'll see disappearing.

Yeah, this was one of the few instances where having the full product available for free actually served as free advertising.

Napster and pirating has had a huge inpact on the music industry, but the average manga fan will buy print copies, if only for diffrent/better translations. I've said this on several occasion, but anime fans are a different breed.

At least the publisher's are being vindictive about it and going after the scanslators.

Oh well. All I know is that I don;t like Bleach enough to support it or any products with any amount of money.

I'm furious, for two reasons. One I love reading ahead and teasing my friend who refuses to read ahead. Two. MangaFox is the only place I can find Shoujo Sect, a decent yuri manga

It's not just Onemanga - over 30 big mangasites are closing down bit by bit and more will follow. It was to be expected sooner or later.

I don't mind that much - if you don't search for a damn unknown manga if you search long enough you'll find it + for every big closed site a smaller one will appear, then there are torrents, darknets and whatnot.