Few days ago, I was shocked when Manga Toshokan finally taken down the majority of series they host. That means, almost all of the scanlated manga is gone in their site, leaving to manhwa and manhua (Korean and Chinese comic respectively). While I read some manhwa and manhua, it still sad to see all of the manga gone, since Manga Toshokan have a huge collection of manga that I can’t find anywhere.

That’s not ended here. One Manga will also close in a week time. One Manga is my favorite online reader site, though the quality is not as good as the one hosted in Manga Toshokan, it is much faster to load. Now they still have a good time updating any manga they had until the closing end. That’s the final week for them.

Two of the big sites have taken down for now or continue with lesser series, now there is also another big name that likely to follow them. Manga Fox for example. They still have majority of the series now, but the big three (as you might now, the big three is Bleach, One Piece and Naruto) is already taken down. So it seems that’s only time until the other series follow.

Ok, don’t get me wrong. I love manga, I always read them whenever I have time, I read scanlation manga, and whenever my favorite series published in my country, I buy them. I read both, scanlation and published manga. I love scanlation because they have updated series, so I don’t need to wait for months before it published in my country just to know the continuation of the story. There is also, many and many awesome manga that’s not published here, that leaves me with only scanlation manga to read them.

So why did the scanlation sites is taken down? The reason is, recently, US and Japanese publisher are forming a coalition to fight scanlation sites. You can read more on this news on ANN, U.S., Japanese Publishers Unite Against Manga Scan Sites.

Now that it come to this, there should be a solution, for both sides. I know that scanlation is illegal due to copyright issue, but there is a lot of manga that is not available everywhere and not as update as in Japan. I won’t mind if I have to pay to get a licensed manga to read online, so I hope there is still a way, that we can still read manga online, no matter if it is paid or not.

At least, to the extent we can see now, there is two solution. First is the upcoming Open Manga. The second? Obviously, underground… IRC or P2P to get the latest scanlation… lol

Hope everything will be well, but, farewell One Manga. It’s a good year I had with you. I still won’t said farewell to Manga Toshokan, as I will still open them regularly to check for updated manhwa and manhua.

Update: One Manga has taken down all of their manga, farewell One Manga! Now let’s see how’s other sites going.