This is pretty tragic as a non-trivial percentage of these series just aren't available legally in English. I started putting together a list of the series I am reading or have recently read, but it was just too depressing. Between the recent takedown of Tachiyomi and now this, it isn't going to drive people to buy things legally (it it's even possible) as much as it is just going to drive people away from the medium altogether. Piracy will still exist for the very driven fans, but the general consumer will just move on to something else vying for their attention.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Being available is one thing but quality is also important. I started rereading an older series recently and had to switch to the official source for a few chapters - the image quality difference between MD and the official source was horrendous (with the latter being worse obviously).
If you're a publisher then at least provide people with some decent reading experience instead of forcing better alternatives out. Corpos never learn...
It's crazy how low-res the images often are even when you pay for digital manga from the official source. I know they have higher-res images because the print version is sharper!
Bummer.
I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I started with print and moved online to deeper cuts. A lot of those series are still not officially translated. I’ve been consuming fan translations, official digital translations, and print manga since.
No one should be surprised this happened to MangaDex. It was too convenient and too well known. A lot of the stuff that was removed is niche, but a lot it isn’t. I get why license holders don’t want Spy x Family and Blue Lock available for free on a massive website that tons of people know about.
However, I will not suddenly be pouring money into translators’ pockets. I’m going to read a lot less manga. To me MangaDex was even more useful as a hub than it was for being free. Excellent usability, good library function, okay searchability, great responsiveness, and no shitty app. No, Viz, I’m not going to download your shitty app.
It’s not 2002 with amazing fan forums. Reddit is a bot cesspool (with a shitty app). I don’t have peers who consume manga anymore. Without something like MangaDex I won’t know what to try or buy and I’ll be out of the habit of starting new manga. The money I was spending on manga related stuff, largely at cons, sometimes a lot of money, is going to drop a lot. I hope fifty more free downloads of the shitty app were worth it.
I feel very sad.
We’ll see if something else decent pops up. MangaDex had a good run. And this forum is actually not negligible; I’ve started several manga because I saw them here.
@wjs018@ani.social would it be possible to temp pin this post for a bit as people should be informed about why their manga's been murdered by the DMCA takedown and I don't want this post to potentially be buried
Done!
Thank you!~🤗
That explains it. I was partway through reading a manga, then it stopped loading and told me there weren't any pages. Which was odd because I was sure I was looking at a page from it just an hour before.
Scrolled through the list and recognized at least 50 I was following.
Yeah, I was surprised at the number of small, obscure stuff that was taken down as well. The kind of stuff that is unlikely to ever get licensed. Painful day.
Just did a full refresh of my Mihon library and there are 49 series giving an error for me now. Some of those are older series that have completed, some are series that I have stopped reading but never removed from my library, but a lot aren't.
This is why we need to archive everything. And why sites should make it as easy as one click.
And here’s a reminder to go seed the Anna’s Archive backups, if you have the space for it. Even if you aren’t able to seed the entire thing, you can always grab one or two parts of the torrent and seed just those. Just grab whichever parts have the lowest availability rating.
I already am. By the way, does AA have manga? How much?
I hope this is the only instance of a takedown of this magnitude for a while, but I fear the publishers are now smelling the blood in the water now that the Mangadex team have folded to pressure once. Worst case scenario they get repeated takedowns and vanish over time, or shut down like Batoto. I guess this will just repeat the cycle of; community manga site gets popular -> popular community site gets taken down -> surge in use of aggregators -> aggregators increase ads -> community gathers around new popular site. Rinse and repeat, as manga publishers refuse realize what Gabe Newell has known for decades, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
I mean, it's not like MD team stood up to DMCA claims before. They were always willing to oblige whenever a license holder requested them to remove series they're responsible for or post the links to official releases.
This one is simply the biggest one yet.
Edit: It also doesn't help that this will push people to sites that could not care less about DMCAs or linking to official sources. I feel like this will only work against the publishers in the long run.
BREAKING NEWS:
User search for "Qbittorrent" surges by 10000%
Are these even available on torrents?
Raws ~80 - 99% (also depending on your sources)
For pretranslated a bit of yes and no but primarily not. This I'd suggest going to your favorite scanlation user/group pages and look for their Patreon, Kofi, Discord.
So the answer's a bit of a mixed bag but if you want to keep a manga that you love with the highest quality possible, currently these are the optimal routes that's available atm.
Omfg....
Azumaga, Skip & Loafer, and After-School Insomniacs were the Mangadex tabs I had open for the last few days.. and they're gone..
😢
Rip. I skimmed through the list and some of the titles weren't updated in months on MD. Too bad about all the others though.
Like mic_check_one_two & I mentioned, folks need to make distribution expensive for tyrants. Not only are bittorrents great at distributing mirrors of media, but great at ensuring copies do not become lost media.
We can easily make SimpleXchat scanlations groups to completely decentralize media as a community. But it will take your first honest step to do so.
What can I help to encourage you to drop mangasites & discord altogether?
Hey, as long as its not open source, piracy is okay.
Will this also hit comick?
Good thing about Kotatsu is that I can find alternatives & save progress even with these gone...
I really forgot about looking alternatives in kotatsu, thanks for reminder
1500 series now. 🥲