The global manga boom has created a paradox: unprecedented demand, but a severe shortage of officially translated content—fueling a piracy crisis that is costing the industry trillions.
“There is a global demand for manga worldwide, and there’s far more demands than any content that’s officially translated right now, and that’s a very big issue,” said Shoko Ugaki, CEO of manga translation company Orange Inc., in an interview with Variety.
According to Orange’s internal survey, only around 30,000 manga titles have been officially translated into English. In contrast, pirated English-language versions outnumber them by a staggering margin—“about five times more than officially translated manga,” per Ugaki.
This imbalance has created what industry insiders describe as a structural bottleneck. Despite manga’s explosive global growth—driven in large part by anime adaptations and streaming platforms—the lack of accessible, licensed translations continues to push fans toward unofficial channels.
“Most of the manga the fans read, they’re reading the pirated version, so that is the bottleneck,” Ugaki said. “Officially translated manga is about several thousand titles, which is 20,000 books or comics right now. I own 30,000 comic books privately. So officially translated manga is less than what I own privately.”
“A lot of pirated versions — five to 10 times more than officially translated versions — are translated by volunteers. So the manga fans, if you like manga more, then you read more pirated versions. The issue is that there is no returns for the creators of these [pirated] mangas, that’s the bottleneck.”
The financial impact is severe. Ugaki estimates that manga piracy resulted in losses of “close to 6 trillion Japanese yen (≈USD$40 billion) last year alone,” underscoring the scale of the problem.
“There’s no appropriate compensation for creators of manga, and at the same time, all the publishers, they don’t receive income or revenue because of the piracy issues,” Ugaki said. “Then they cannot allocate enough budget to create the next works or next line of work, so this influences the entire ecosystem of this manga industry.”
At the center of efforts to address this gap is Orange’s digital platform, emaqi, a cross-publisher manga app designed to scale official translations and make previously unavailable titles accessible to global audiences.
The company’s recent release of “The Gene of AI”—a critically acclaimed manga first published in Japan in 2016—highlights the issue. Despite spawning a global anime adaptation on Crunchyroll in 2023, the original manga only received its first official English release in May 2026 through Orange’s partnership with Akita Shoten.
Orange’s strategy is rooted in a simple premise: increase supply to reduce piracy.
“If we can establish the system and produce more official translations, then that will be beneficial for not only creators, but all the publishers that participate in our system, so that within that system we can create a more beneficial cycle for everyone to produce more and produce better works in the future,” Ugaki said. “I believe that we are going to have to put everything we have into this industry itself to raise more official translation and official services, so less people will use or depend on pirated versions.”
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The demand side of the equation shows no signs of slowing. Ugaki points to the global rise of anime—alongside breakout adaptations like Netflix’s One Piece—as a major driver of manga’s international appeal.
“I think anime started this manga appetite globally; however, I think that we’re still at the very early phase; that global populations or audiences are starting to notice or become aware of the sort of appeal that manga and anime has, so we have a lot more to offer,” Ugaki said.
“However, we have so much to do in order to convey the appeal of manga compared to anime. We need to do more, so that global audiences will be more aware of appeal and attractiveness of manga. In Japan, it’s common sense, where everyone knows that all these anime came from manga, or the manga was the original, and then that was made into anime. But this kind of flow is not really understood overseas, so that is another aspect that we need to work on.”
Until that gap is closed, the industry faces a stark reality: a global audience eager to consume manga, but an ecosystem still struggling to deliver it—legally, at scale, and in time to compete with piracy.
