I only buy a manga when it's really a good manga. I see the scanlations more as a preview to see if a manga title is even worth my time and money or not. I'll buy them anyway on Ebay if I like them. Plus,I buy figurines and I'm even planning on starting to buy anime DVD's and OST's IF they weren't so damn expensive all the time.

They want us to buy their stuff,but then they should consider that not everyone can just buy something,especially when it's a DVD that's overly expensive. <- this counts for all movies and CD's,btw. They're trying to force us to stop illegal downloading and scanlations/anime streaming while the prices only keep increasing. Yeah,that really seems logic to me (not.) Especially now in this crisis,we get less money to spend and everything gets more expensive. We're forced to make priorities and sadly enough,manga and anime doesn't always come first.

If they really want to increase sales,make the products less expensive,when people see that it's cheap,they'll buy it. It will be a bit of a loss of money at first,but since more and more people would buy it,you'd only gain more from it later on. That's what I think,at least.

I don't doubt there is some truth to this (don't many Japanese students take a basic English course in middle school? Plenty could probably advance well enough to read manga scans in English), but I agree with Ichigo on this one. They probably shouldn't be citing that particular statistic if there are so many other possible causes for it.

Hmm. As much as they blame us, it does suck how we do have to pay more for manga over here in the States and elsewhere in the world =A=; LOL Our economy is horrible right now and buying tons of volumes of manga is the last thing on my list right now. @_@ lols, as much as I would love to buy manga,... I've heard that from my friend and from other sources, you only really pay 4-5 bucks for manga over there in Japan ._.

I wish importing was cheaper. :|

However, it is true that I do see a lot of scanlations coming in from China and Japan on websites.. that they get their scanlations from those people and then it is passed onto for English-scanlating groups to translate.

I think it's the effects of the US economy right now that are just really affecting the manga and anime industry right now and I think it plays a huge role in the decrease of sales of manga in Japan. ._.

Maybe if they tried publishing manga online with strict internet security and "force" people to pay money to read a chapter/volume.. then they would have less problems with losing money by having people pass out "free services" dealing with scanlated manga... ... but that still would deal a great impact on the economy anyway since I think a lot of people don't want to pay for their manga, even if it was distributed on the internet at cheap costs.

Even though manga can be expensive at times, I still buy it. (YES ANOTHER SERIES IN MY COLLECTION!) I also prefer having an actual book infront of my eyes, rather than a scan on the computer. A physical book (in my opinion) is easier to see-not only the pictures-but sometimes, the translations can be a bit...What's the word...Um...Scary?

@AP Ichigo:

Well, the article did mention that she attributed the decline not only to scanlations but also because of the economy and exaggerated expectations. Also, it isn't very clear if she thought scanlations were either correlated or a causal factor to decline in manga sales.

This is pretty hilarious, considering most scanlators get their raw scans from Japanese p2p networks in the first place.

Awwwww, scanlation seems to be indeed a problem...
But, well, where I am, mangas are so much more expensive every year ;A;