This was a small part of my collection three years ago.

On average, I spend anywhere between 2,000$USD and 4000$USD every year on manga. While I do occasionally purchase from domestic publishers such as Del Rey, Vertical, Yen Press, Tokyopop, Dark Horse and Viz; I primarily purchase a majority of my manga from online book retail shop bk1 or amazon. It’s not necessarily because the English line-up of manga is bland and lacks the presence of good titles. Actually, manga in America in current years has severely improved since the turn of the millenium. But I’m going off on another tangent… When you get down to it, I enjoy reading manga in my hand, and the monitor makes my eyes hurt.

I also hate piracy, but that would be rather hypocritical for me to claim.

My Japanese is far from proficient, but I can read most manga with no problem. And if I have no idea what the characters are saying, I just look at the pretty pictures and feel quite satisfied with myself. And yet, I still feel the need to download scanlation. I’m still working out the reasoning behind that. I own most manga I download the scanlations for, and in some cases I’m actually a bit ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the English-speaking world. Yet I still download scanlation.

So what exactly am I doing?

I guess I’m just not willing to give up on a major aspect of my adolescence. It’s also nice to read another translator’s take on a particular passage or exchange of dialogue. Sometimes I read scanlated works and think about how much of a better job I could have done on the translation, or sometimes I realize my interpretation of a particular scene was just plain wrong. It’s kind of refreshing to have scanlation, but I don’t condone it. I’m sort of a wishy-washy person. I don’t particularly find scanlation evil, but if someone boasts that he has read 90+ volumes of manga and hasn’t spent a single dollar on any one manga; then that just makes me really mad.

Occasionally, the way a translator presents a series can change my entire view on a series. Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, for example, did not seem like a series that I would be interested in. Then I went and read abcd’s translation and I could not stop laughing. It changed my whole perspective on the series. Perhaps scanlation is a necessary evil, not only for the Japanophiles who aren’t willing to sit down and learn the god-forsaken language, but also for veteran manga fanatics. After all, I probably wouldn’t have purchased most of my manga if not influenced by the scanlation on the Internet.

Or maybe I would’ve. Who knows?