I’ve always tried to maintain my neutrality in the ongoing scanlators v publishers debate, since frankly I can see both sides of the argument. I’ve always thought that there was room enough in the industry for both.
Publishers published the licensed stuff, scanlators stuck to the unlicensed stuff. Sadly as of this morning my stance has changed and I’m giving up all my scans (which scarily has freed up close to a terabyte of hard drive space).
So what’s happened? Well, I recently started to review titles for NetComics, they’re a small publisher that has an online reader. You rent manga by the chapter, for $0.20-0.35 a chapter, which I frankly think is exceptionally good value. Though I do wish the rental time was longer, 72hours would be better than 48.
Anyway, I was looking around the net and came across a group that frankly has proved to me that scanlators have lost all their moral credibility. This group has been stealing NetComics stuff directly from their viewer. They have the gall to rent the chapters, use a screen capture and then post them as their releases.
What’s really ironic is that all of these images carry the NetComics logo, which kinda puts their statement that it’s their work to be a lie. What’s really pissing me off is that there’s no reason for it. You can rent an entire volume of manga from NetComics for a mere $1. With manga costing that much there’s no reason possible for not supporting the publisher and buying from them.
Sites like this make me sick.
