Manga is a piece of Japan's heart. I'm not even kidding. It's practically referenced everywhere. It's a part of Japan's history, present, and future.
And in recent years, Japanese pop-culture has come to America. Animations and graphic novels made in America use the manga or anime style.
But then you have the stuff that originated in Japan, and the large numbers of people reading Japanese-born manga online.
Since most of Japan's manga have not been published in America, and most avid readers can't read Japanese, readers have gathered to form multiple communities for the sole purpose of translating manga into (for the most part) English.
These groups of people involve translators and editors (people who are skilled in photoshop and can remove Japanese text, edit the coloring to make it look like the original printed version, and place the English translation into speech bubbles). Manga online is often referred to as "scanlations".
What these communities are doing is technically illegal, but no one really tries to stop them until a Japanese manga has been serialized and about to be published in America.
Now if American publishers were to shut down these sites, thousands of readers would be pissed (myself included). Manga in America is over a year behind it's original Japanese counterpart. Whereas, online scanlations edit, translate, and release chapters the day after it has been released in Japan. Much, much faster.
Therefore, many scanlator communities and publishers have reached an agreement: once a new volume has been published in America, the scanlators take down the related chapters in that volume from their site.
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