Especially with Japanese Mangas, I can understand the appeal of piracy. Most of them officially never see the world outside Japan, so they are very hard to obtain for international readers. Which are a big part of the fandom, though.
So (apart from the stupidity of the tale that every copy would have brought 100% of the sales price if there was no piracy) the losses are primarily due to simply not selling their products on markets that are showing demand.
It’s not even good localisation! Fansubs / scanlations so many times are much better than anything that reaches the international audience. They dumb the fuck down of things to try to please an audience that are not the already hardcore fan readers that want things in a certain way done. I’m not going to buy some things I’d like because they remove color pages, good paper, spell names the wrong way, translate things like san to mr… It’s horrible.
Especially with Japanese Mangas, I can understand the appeal of piracy. Most of them officially never see the world outside Japan, so they are very hard to obtain for international readers. Which are a big part of the fandom, though.
So (apart from the stupidity of the tale that every copy would have brought 100% of the sales price if there was no piracy) the losses are primarily due to simply not selling their products on markets that are showing demand.
Publishers, on international localization:
It’s not even good localisation! Fansubs / scanlations so many times are much better than anything that reaches the international audience. They dumb the fuck down of things to try to please an audience that are not the already hardcore fan readers that want things in a certain way done. I’m not going to buy some things I’d like because they remove color pages, good paper, spell names the wrong way, translate things like san to mr… It’s horrible.
That’s a good point. It points to yet another example of a lack of understanding of their demographic.