Deb Aoki: So I think companies are really listening to fans and trying to respond to their needs, even when they're saying 'I live in rural Romania and I can't get any Japanese books.'
In the past, when I heard those complaints, I used to say, 'Go learn Japanese so you can order and read these books in the original Japanese' - that's what I did before manga was readily available in English. Then these fans come back at me telling me that learning Japanese is really hard, and ordering Japanese books and having them shipped to whatever far-off country they live in is so, so expensive. After a certain point, I just back off.
David Steinberger: Right. On top of that, you have individual creators that own their work. When you talk about Image Comics, for example, there's tons of stuff that has just been published and is now no longer in print. It becomes very difficult for a company like me to do an individual deal with every single company or creator, especially when we're kind of in our infancy, you know? Especially in these first couple of years, when we're we setting up all those types of systems.
Again, I think you're going to see the creator-owned publishing houses doing deals with the creators saying, we will distribute and market you digitally. So, we'll all get this back in one place and move forward. But it's a function of people being caught with their pants down and doing five-year deals that just simply don't make sense now that did before, or seemed to make sense for how things were four years ago.
SO WHAT IS "SCANLATION" ANYWAY?
Douglas Wolk: Before we continue, I notice we've been throwing the term "scanlation" around a lot. Is there anyone who would like an explanation? (about a third of the audience raises their hands) Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what "scanlations" are.
Jake Forbes: So in Japan, there are literally hundreds of graphic novel size books that come out every month. The market is huge there. They have these phonebook-sized anthologies that come out on a weekly or monthly basis. There's so much content in Japan, we only see a tiny fraction of that in legal translation.
There's an audience that's hungry for manga all over the world. There are people who are passionate fans who like to consume that content. Only a few of these fans know Japanese and they like to use their amateur Japanese skills. Some of them are really quite good. Some of them are really terrible.
Scanlation groups work with a translator and with somebody who can use Photoshop to can strip out all the Japanese text and replace it with the English text. Then they either host it on a torrent site or they put it on the aggregator sites, or both.
It's all done kind of anonymously, as a labor of love to bring as much of that content to an audience who can't read Japanese. There's a sense of pride, like I'm doing something for my fellow fans and like I'm trading my work for some of your work and we're all in this together.
There's also the sense of discovery of, where a fan feels proud to think that 'I'm ahead of the curve, I can find out what's not in the market yet, before everyone else.' That kind of goes with the people who are really into this, they think they are doing a service for the industry because they are creating demand for the content.
Douglas Wolk: How much do you think that's true?
Jake Forbes: I think it is true to some degree, but it's not a legitimate response. Ultimately, you can't say "I know what's better for this property than the creator or the publisher does" -- it's a kind of arrogance.
But I think that the publishers and the creators are so far behind the curve that oftentimes it is creating that demand. I wish the publishers would take responsibility, but at least for manga, there is so much content out there - licensed or not. If there's no way for fans to be introduced to it, then you can't really get the momentum of the fandom really clamoring for something. Nowadays, scanlations are the main way for fans to find out about new manga titles.
Deb Aoki: If you've seen people walking around the convention center today in Prussian military outfits carrying flags, that's because of Hetalia. And just so you know, TokyoPop's edition of the first volume of Hetalia: Axis Powers won't show up in your bookstores until October.
This transcript continues in Comic-Con 2010: Digital Piracy Panel Part 2, as the panelists discuss the upsides and downsides of proprietary file formats, scanlation ethics and excuses, and figuring out a fair market price for online comics.
