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Rant: "Spoonfeeding is bad"/Manga scanlators have it hard


TrishaCat
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I realize this seems awfully niche, so let me explain myself. For a little over a year (maybe longer), I've been waiting for a particular Japan-only manga by the name of "Tsunousagi: The Jackalope" to get translated. After all this time of waiting, I decided to go onto an anime forum and ask why it hadn't been translated. Shortly after asking, someone who is part of a team of translators actually came to me and asked me if it was online, saying that if I could provide high quality raw scans of this manga he might be able to get it translated. Excited at this chance, I decided to look around online for it, only to find that the manga is so obscure that its not been uploaded anywhere onto the internet. Due to this, I decided to take it upon myself to attempt to do this after finding out that ebooks for the manga are sold on various online Japanese book stores. Its extremely important to me that Tsunousagi gets translated, as it is by Sho Shibamoto, the author of my favorite manga and webcomic, "Pandemonium: Wizard Village". I went ahead and bought the manga on one of these bookstores, a store called "Animate Book Store". However after buying it, I realized that it does not download as a PDF or anything useful like that. Rather, its just made to where I can read it anytime I want online, and there are protections in place to ensure I can just open images in a new tab.

Confused, I decided to ask around on various websites, including 4chan, as it has a very dedicated community towards this sort of thing. But the thing is, its anime board, /a/, loathes people asking for help, citing that as "spoonfeeding", so I decided to try the incredibly slow board /wsr/, which stands for Work-safe requests to ask for help. There I told my problem, and I was given directions via a temporary 10-minute pastebin. While I managed to acquire these directions, going back to them proved to be difficult since the pastebin vanished. When I went through various archival websites for 4chan's anime board to search for more help, I came across the same problem: Any useful links were placed in temporary pastebins that, by the time I arrived to them, were already defunct and no longer usable. (for those who don't know, pastebin is a website where you can paste text and save that for future use. Normally, its by default permanent, but it is possible to make them only last a certain period of time). Anyways, in the end I managed to get software that was supposed to be able to rip pages from online websites automatically, but unfortunately, it didn't work for me for some reason. So, I did some digging around and after spending several hours on various websites, I acquired different ripping tools, all having the similar problems and not working for me. It turned out many of those ripping tools were site specific however, and do not work on Animate.

After waking up this morning, I decided to visit /a/ and it actually had a scanlation thread recently made for it, so I decided to visit the thread and ask for help. In the end, no one was able to provide any useful information other than what programs I need that should work, however no one's willing to actually provide links to them. By the looks of it, many there often say that people should go through the archives for the website in order to find information rather than just giving it since they think outright giving information is, once again, "spoonfeeding", and thus according to them "invites newfags" or "makes threads shitty". People are essentially expected to find them themselves, and while digging around, I just found more useless pastebins. And its gotten so bad that when people do ask for links in the scanlation threads, they just ask for 10 minute pastebins. I don't understand this; why would you knowingly ask for information to be available only temporarily? Would that not invite only more people asking for help, which is exactly what they want to avoid? And wouldn't making information more readily available only make it easier for more manga to get translated, which is great for everyone since not every work gets published in the West?

I really hate 4chan's, and especially /a/'s, culture of making everyone do things themselves. I understand that sometimes people just don't know how to look for things themselves and that people need to be able to do that, but at a certain point this kind of culture is counterproductive and comes off as extremely rude.

Anywho, in the end I never managed to get the programs I need (and the only link I ever did find led to what appears to be malware and nothing useful), and so I have yet to find out if I can do this, which means that, for the meantime, I'm still unable to get one of my more anticipated works translated, and its partially the fault of the people who most obsess over these things.

Anyways, rant over.

TL;DR: Cultures of avoidance of spoonfeeding suck and Japanese ebook sellers like to make things incredibly difficult for people to actually make use of the books they buy.

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20 minutes ago, Toshabi said:

4 chan sucks.

I dunno. I like its relaxed rules, and because threads don't last forever, you can refresh topics with totally fresh new responses and interest rather than the way a lot of other forums will have one ongoing thread that eventually tires out once it loses relevancy.

Plus the vast size of the userbase there means I can talk about even the most obscure of things and still get a decent amount of feedback. And since its a site heavily influenced by Japanese culture (or I guess the anime side of it, anyways, with it taking heavy influence from 2ch), it has a lot of people who are incredibly knowledgable about the subject.

I'm not saying its perfect by any means, but there are some things about it that are really cool and useful. But the userbase there is full of....well, it can oftentimes be very unpleasant. Such as in this case. There are people with vast stores of useful knowledge, but are unwilling to share it. Which I guess is fine; they don't have to, but the fact that they go out of their way to make things difficult for people who want help doesn't do any good.

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23 minutes ago, GarthTheWereWolf said:

If the images are in browser only why not just print screen them and paste into paint to save each page individually? Bit more work intensive since you have to cut out each page from rest of your screen but if you're not finding anything else that works anyway...

I mean, that's possible but very tiring and wouldn't result in quite as high res images. I'd want to avoid that if possible. I intend to do that if all else fails, but I want to try other options first, as it should be possible to get higher res images with less effort.

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This thread is far less whiney than I expected and actually demonstrates a fairly valiant effort.  If you go the screen shot method, I suggest trying to find a way to bullshit your renderer or desktop to operating at a much higher resolution than normal, like 4K, to try and not get it scaled down as much for your existing display.

Also, I gotta ask, is a paper version and scanning not an option?

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I don't know much about the online manga scene, but isn't breaking the DRM and downloading an e-book the publisher obviously doesn't want downloaded, and then distributing that to others to translate, technically illegal and maybe not something people want to advertise or just tell anyone about?

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21 minutes ago, Chrysocyon said:

I don't know much about the online manga scene, but isn't breaking the DRM and downloading an e-book the publisher obviously doesn't want downloaded, and then distributing that to others to translate, technically illegal and maybe not something people want to advertise or just tell anyone about?

Possibly.

@Battlechili put "allegedly" at the beginning of your post. This solves all legal problems. :v

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17 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

This thread is far less whiney than I expected and actually demonstrates a fairly valiant effort.  If you go the screen shot method, I suggest trying to find a way to bullshit your renderer or desktop to operating at a much higher resolution than normal, like 4K, to try and not get it scaled down as much for your existing display.

Also, I gotta ask, is a paper version and scanning not an option?

I'll look into seeing if that's possible, thanks!

As for physical copies, that's certainly do-able, however I don't have a scanner. 

6 hours ago, Chrysocyon said:

I don't know much about the online manga scene, but isn't breaking the DRM and downloading an e-book the publisher obviously doesn't want downloaded, and then distributing that to others to translate, technically illegal and maybe not something people want to advertise or just tell anyone about?

Normally, I would say it is, or at the very least it'd be certainly a gray area, although these don't have any publisher in the West, so I'm not certain. Regardless, this manga in particular is a special case to where that may not apply anyways. The publisher, Ikki-Para, hosted the manga as a webcomic viewable on their website for free for a good long time, and it was available as normal images that could be easily saved. There wasn't any fancy DRM protection on it; it was as protected as any webcomic artist's tumblr page. Its no longer uploaded now, but such is a result of the publisher removing ALL manga from its website, while links to them for reading are still available on their website, which leads me to believe the publisher is either not faring well or is renovating its website and not because the publisher deliberately wanted it to stop being available. (or maybe it wasn't removed, but links are just now broken)

Regardless, after hearing that his manga was no longer publicly available, Sho Shibamoto uploaded every page of Pandemonium onto his Deviantart, despite the manga being sold in stores in Japan and France. I would imagine the reason he hasn't done this for Tsunousagi is because there wasn't a demand for it and because Tsunousagi didn't get an official English translation, so there'd be no demand for it on a site like Deviantart.

....I guess that's a long-winded way of me saying "It was available to the public legally for free, so in this case it may not be such a problem". Still,  if you think I should, and in fact it seems like a fairly good idea to do so, I'll ask the artist and see if he'd be willing to upload Tsunousagi as well on his Deviantart and see what he says. That'd be telling of its legal position and also possibly give another route for getting high quality scans.

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