What will be future of reading manga online for free? (a random rambling)

With the closing of key sites such as Onemanga and Mangafox, among others, one is left to wonder what to do next?

Last week I looked for Naruto 504 and Bleach and it was a nightmare struggling on sites that want to charge you $$$ for subscribing, not to mention tons of annoying pop up ads.

Either I succumb to that new site Openmanga.com, or get my scanlations on torrentz and private forums.

:-/

URGENTE: One Manga cierra sus puertas!

La guerra contra los sitios de scanlations continua y esta vez el sitio afectado no es otro que Onemanga.com.

En un comunicado que salió hoy en la portada principal del sitio web de manga online, Zabi, uno de los dueños, informó que las editoriales japonesas y estadounidenses le dijeron que su posición con respecto a la publicación de scanlations habia cambiado radicalmente, y que por eso ellos deberían remover todo el contenido para la semana que viene.

Esto es un duro golpe para nosotros los fans, que estabamos acostumbrados a leer nuestro capitulo semanal de nuestra serie favorita aunque fuese traducido al ingles!

Onemanga.com fue uno de los sitios web mas visitados según el ranking de Google, ocupando el puesto numero 935 de los 1000 páginas con más visitantes. El foro seguirá activo, mientras tanto.

Todo indica que la iniciativa de crear OpenManga.com como plataforma en la que todos los mangakas puedan publicar su trabajo directamente está más cerca de lo que pensamos. OpenManga sería el equivalente de Crunchyroll, si nos ponemos a ver.

Espero que esto sea para lo mejor!

Este es el texto del comunicado de Onemanga.com:

It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July 2010).
So what next? We're not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear.
You can also show us some love in this moment of sadness by 'liking' our brand new Facebook page. It would be nice to see just how many of you came to enjoy our 'better than peanut butter and jelly' invention.

Regardless of whether you stay with us or not, on behalf of the One Manga team, I would like to thank you all for your unwavering support over the years. Through the ups and downs you have stuck with us, and that is what kept us going.
As a certain Porky was fond of saying... That's all folks!
Time for me to go lay down and let this all sink in.

- Zabi

The famous website, along with others, has removed 350 titles in their stock. Their manager is currently negotiating with representatives of Japanese and U.S. publishers, who formed a coalition on June 8th, for the removal of many manga scanlations that represent financial losses for them.

Mangafox is owned by a Chinese company called Hangzhou Noez Technology Co., Ltd, and it was in the Alexa ranking as one of the 2,000 most visited sites with a million daily visitors from around the world (!!!).

The company has other sites dedicated to streaming anime episodes, a download site and a social networking site exclusively for fans of anime and manga like us.

Wow, this is quite a blow to those who are looking for a specific title, although some people might think that reading manga online legally is much better.

(yeah, right)