The pirate scanlation site one manga.com has posted a notice stating: “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).”

As ICv2 reported in May, the one manga site reached #935 on Google’s list of the most-visited sites on the Web with an estimated 4.2 million unique visitors per month and a mammoth 1.1 billion page views per month (see “Pirate Manga Site Makes Google’s Top 1000”).  In June a group of American and Japanese manga publishers announced the foundation of an industry group to fight the unauthorized posting of manga titles on the Internet (see “Manga Publishers Form Anti-Piracy Coalition”).

While the action by one manga.com demonstrates that the publishers have had some success in shutting down the high profile “aggregator” sites like one manga, those searching out free unlicensed manga still have other options including use groups, torrents, and IRC.  Also serious manga devotees, who want to read series that haven’t been licensed yet or will never be licensed for print publication because of poor sales propects, will still be tempted to seek out scanlated versions. 

The decline in the number of manga volumes released in English indicates that publishers are becoming more conservative and licensing fewer series (see ‘Fewer Manga in 2010”).  Ideally in the future publishers will make more obscure manga series, the kind that aren't licensed now, available digitally for a reasonable price, but right now that sort of solution appears to be a long way off though publishers and sites like Crunchyroll are taking the first steps towards a future for manga that includes a major digital distribution component.