Mangadex, one of the biggest manga scan sites, has been hit with a cataclysmic number of copyright strikes from Japanese publishers that removed hundreds of series all at once. And, while some of these series are purchasable in English, others that were only accessible via fan translations and are now lost to readers who don’t know Japanese.
As a site, Mangadex is run mostly by unpaid volunteers and isn’t charging for access. It’s mostly ad free and is funded by donations and affiliate partner links, mainly for purchasing the physical volumes of manga.
Many of the series on the site have since been officially translated to English and are available for sale, making it entirely reasonable that publishers may want to take down free online translations to make money off selling volumes.
However, hundreds of other manga series were removed from the site that were a bit more obscure and never got officially published in English, leaving them inaccessible to potential fans.
Japanese publishers target manga fan sites
Mangadex is self-described as a “scanlation” site, which is a process where someone takes scans of the original manga pages, does some photoshopping to remove the original text from speech bubbles, and writes in new text to translate.
Not only does it require expertise, it also requires a great deal of time and knowhow to provide clean scanlations. Many of the people who provide these translations do so for the love of it.
What’s more, many manga series take a long time to get an official translation and be made available for purchase. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, one of the most popular manga series in the world, doesn’t have an English release for part 9 just yet despite it being serialized since 2023.
As a result of these takedowns, the Jojolands is no longer available on Mangadex, and being able to follow the story in English is much harder for fans of the series.
However, readers in English and other languages can expect to get this series at some point considering how popular Jojo’s is. The same may not be true for the latest volumes of Hajime no Ippo, a manga series with almost 1500 Chapters, most of which were removed overnight. Hundreds of hours of work in fan translation gone.
Early volumes are available in English, but it eventually stopped being published. As a result, fans who have been following the series for decades no longer have a way to read it.
Hajime no IppoSure, the original files for these scanlations are out there somewhere, and the source material could be re-scanned and translated.
However, in the case that publishers continue to go after scan sites, it could make it a lot more difficult for fans to bring series they’re passionate about outside of their original Japanese publication.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.