Towards free manga and richer artists

A few weeks ago, I attended the conference “INTERCULTURAL CROSSOVERS, TRANSCULTURAL FLOWS: MANGA/COMICS” in Cologne, at which the well-known pioneer translator of many famous Japanese manga and anime, Frederic Schodt, gave a keynote speech. He introduced his work and addressed several issues in the process of translating, layouting and publishing Japanese manga in the US. He identified the increasing amount of illegal scans and so-called “scanlations” – scans of manga with text translations made by volunteers – that circulate among fans As one pressing threat to professionally translated and published manga.
Schodt seems to be not alone with this concern, as an article on the Japanese page of Yahoo from Nov. 17th shows. Acoording to ITmedia, well-known manga artist Ken Akamatsu has had mixed feelings about fans who value his work but don’t want to pay for it for some time. Now he has decided to act and “turn the whole manga business upside down” by creating a company that offers free downloads of manga online. According to the article on Yahoo, Akamatsu’s business model is to collect scanned manga from fans and make them available for free online in combination with advertising. The revenue of the advertisements will be distributed among the artists, who have been asked for permission in advance. The Yahoo-article remarks that Akamatsu's company will only deal with out-of-print manga, and therefore won't be a threat to the interests of other publishing houses. He himself sees the aim of this effort in “protecting the manga culture Japan takes pride in, and conserving it for future generations in a proper way.”
Rhetoric aside, the idea sounds very interesting and, if it works, it might be a way of using the economic potential of the internet to the benefit of both the creators of content and its users (as opposed to many cases in which users are allowed to create content for free but the respective company profits alone). Akamatsu’s model, rather than simply giving the users free content at the cost of the artists, introduces a third party (the advertiser), who might benefit from the fact that the site attracts a great number of people with some shared interests. Since the productive process is long complete and future revenues are probably insignificant, this seems to create revenues for the artists where none can be expected any more. But of course, there are a lot of “ifs” here, and the list is far from complete. As digitalized content, once circulated, cannot be banned or withdrawn from the net any more, one of the challenges will be, whether the site attracts enough people who care enough for a free but “legal” way of acquiring such works (and are willing to skip though advertising pages).
In any case, if this is a serious attempt, it might be worth having an eye on in the future. In the meanwhile, more information on the idea can be found on Akamatsu blog.