

In Asia, it is not unusual for a manga licensee, instead of paying extra fees
to obtain raw print material directly from Japan, to scan tankobons and
reprint them.

This is cheaper, but as a result, the images will be slightly enlarged/cropped
compared to the Japanese original. This is because the scanned data tend to
leave out the print bleed, and part of the non-bleed edge gets reprinted as
print bleed instead.

Also, when scanning is not done properly, the scanned manga screentones will
see some tearing and other undesired extra patterns.

Does this also happen with Western manga licensees and content distributors?


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2020-11-09T15:18:18.630
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2022-08-16T04:04:35.540
2020-11-24T01:53:15.723
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question
manga-production licensing
Do manga licensees in North America and Europe obtain material by scanning tankobons or purchase raw data directly?


I'm not sure if I can fully answer your question, mainly because I am just a
consumer and not involved in any way in the industries. But I do (slightly)
recall on eBookJapan (before Yahoo.co.jp bought them out) older manga was (or
looked/felt like) scanned, but later on, they would remaster, and sometimes
even digitally publish black-and-white version and colored remastered version,
and charge differently.

Also, I am not in a market as a consumer of translated tankoubon (i.e. as you
say, "Asia region" and western licensors) other than Japanese so I can only
answer for digital manga I purchase from the few places I can purchase from
direct in Japan (before eBookJapan was owned by Yahoo.co.jp, I was able to pay
with non-Japanese credit card, now it is more difficult to buy - mainly I
presume due to copyright law only protects Japanese publishers in Japan) but
the scanned ones I've seen were only from my curiosities of nostalgias of "oh
I want to read this manga again" and did the tachiyomi to see if I really
wanted to purchase it, so I have no purchased copies of any tankoubon that
looks like it was scanned for a proof.

Again, I do not know if I did answer at least a little, of your question,
mainly because I am not in the market for other Asian translations, but as
mentioned, due to copyright limitations, if it is scanned, I have second
thoughts that they might not be a legitimate publisher, but you can probably
go to eBookJapan to see if they have (as in, they are selling) a digital
version of the tankoubon you are interested in, and if they sell it, most
likely there exists a legitimate digital version from the publisher (I am not
here to preach about piracy or how important it is to support manga authors,
so leave it up to your discretions on whether you want to pay/support scanned
market), and I hope I was able to indirectly answer some parts.


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2020-11-23T15:44:15.557
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answer