Last week, I finally added an overdue comment policy explicitly telling readers not to post or request links to illicit material after seeing yet another comment asking where one can read the Karin (Chibi Vampire) manga online:
OMG Can enyone tell me where i can get Chibi on line!!!! its driving me crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One of the unspoken rules of participating in viewing fansubs/scanlations is to not publicly ask for where to obtain such illicit goods. (Another is not to monetize it through donations or subscription fees but that’s another subject.) If you really want to read or watch content for free, then do your own damn research - it’s not that difficult, sadly. While I don’t believe that scanlations have as severe an effect on the manga industry as fansubbing does to anime, it can still breed the feeling that one deserves to read something for free.
I personally have not read or looked for scanlations for about a year and that was just to see what Shirow Miwa’s Dogs and Sakae Esuno’s Mirai Nikki were about by reading a few chapters. I will try to check Dogs out further whenever it hits American shelves along with Maid-sama, Shinji Ikari Raising Project and some others I can’t recall at the moment.
That short list of my anticipated releases says something about my limited interest in the manga scene, which makes my authoring of this post a bit strange from my standing as a fringe reader. I never understood the rationale of complaining that something became licensed in your region because that means it becomes more easily accessible; this is more so for manga than anime because you can now read them in paper form, assuming you couldn’t read Japanese and didn’t have a Kinokuniya nearby. You can even sit on a couch in a bookstore and read whole volumes - I don’t care, just stop complaining that you cannot access a series or, worse, brazenly continue to do so.
Saying that you’re reading it in a browser and not downloading is a faulty excuse just as watching an licensed anime series on YouTube, Veoh, or even Crunchyroll is - you are still consuming the media in a non-sanctioned manner assuming it hasn’t been uploading by the actual rights holders.
I have since removed the comments that involved links or requests but you can read them in chronological order after the jump, with the links obviously taken out.
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