I guess getting the rights to manga must be difficult. Which is weird because anime seems to be the opposite, pretty much every anime is on official streaming sites these days.

You have not read a great manga until have read Lone Wolf and Cub.

I tired to get anime legally, but told I could not get them due to regional restriction.

Edit: I mean digitally, I just threw some physical movies and games to save space.

Would become too pricey if you read a lot of manga.. xD
Plus, I read comics which add up (5.99 for 1 issue is too much).

As you put it. For the asian stuff (manga, manhua, manhwa, k-drama, j-drama, taiwanese series, chinese series, asian music, anime) you don't usually get a legal option. Even when there is a legal option, you might not be able to access it because the regional restrictions (Crunchyroll, ANN and Funimation are not viable for me as they do not sell in my country). Many pirates in this area are underserved potential customers.

Very true, even if you get free shipping each volumes cost over $10, if you're a quick reader you can get through a volume in less than hour an hour even if you spend time carefully looking at pages. The cost is obviously printing costs, which is why digital manga should be the future.

There are already mangaka that are starting to self-publish via web. The author of Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita) had a fallout with his publishing house, but he was smart enough to retains the rights for his works.. Like him many others that are growing dissatissfied with the work conditions (they are harsh indeed), the meager pay (it's low compared with what the publishers are getting, many mangaka having a salary like any employee) or the fact that the publishers won't accept things that are going out certain formulas. Hence, the mangakas are moving slowly on the internet. The future is digital, indeed.

I wish there was a subscription service out there for manga(I know Crunchyroll has some, but the selection sucks). Viz has digital but $5-8 per volume for me is still a lot when I'll spend 40 minutes reading and never touch it again.

The problem I have with manga is that I have some backlog, and many times, when I want to buy the continuation of the story, I find out it is no longer available, since it has gone out of print, no one has the rights on the west any more or some similar situation.
Finding some scanlation online to get some "closure" could be a solution to this problem.

I don't find digital books to be as enjoyable as paper ones. Maybe if I had a tablet, or they looked good on my ebook reader...

Yeah it does seem that way. It does look like you can "subscribe" to a series, does it tell you when a new chapter/volume is out? I remember the old MT also used to do this thing where it would strike out (l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶) a volume/chapter when you downloaded it, so if you returned to the page and an old volume was no longer struck out it meant a new version of it had been uploaded (better scan or better translation, etc).

it sorta does that, yes. At one point I could receive RSS notifications for the uploads and filter those that started with [v] so I was only notified of volume uploads, but it was unreliable and I don't recall being able to properly select series. It's all very messy, specially listing the downloads by uploaders. I offered to be an uploader, but then I had to register for each series and kind of "take care" of it which I found somewhat off specially when it came to downloading. Having a dedicated uploader for a particular series is a nice option, but making it required to upload and having to switch between uploaders of a series to find the files you want is quite annoying. Not to mention duplicates.

This was all from a few months ago though, I currently no longer follow any manga. Quite disappointed with the lack of a forum too. You may want to check madokami too, but the registering was a bit complicated and it's not much better than the new MT; but you can still download manga by the volume so...


BTW, it's quite the rebuttal to the whole "piracy are lost sales" argument: you take away my pirate entertainment from me, I go entertain myself somehow else. I do not go jump through hoops to try and get a fraction of what I used to have.

I didn't read that one so eh? Well, i did read Samurai executioner and yes, i'm aware of what happens in LWaC regarding this manga...

And there are others that should be mentioned, Pluto, Monster, 20/21th Century Boys, Parasite, Shin Angyo Onshi, Akumetsu, Bokurano, etc.

I HAVE NOT HEARD OF SAMURAI EXECUTIONER UNTIL NOW?!

What is it and when does it take place?

Is it a prequal, a sequal?

Uhm, it's the same period, LWaC events are after SE but i can't say much because it would be spoilers.
Edit: Just to be clear, it's not really a prequel, the protagonist of SE appears on LWaC.

There's also Path of the Assassin (ninjas stuff) from the same author but honestly i didn't find it as interesting.