OK, so for those who are just too lazy to find stuff, here’s a great tutorial. (I still can’t believe I’m doing this).
1. Buy it! The people at Tokyopop, Del Ray, Viz media etc. have worked their butts off getting manga into English LEGALLY, by obtaining licenses to reproduce the manga. So this should really be your first choice. You may go to your local bookstore.
For those who complain “Well, they don’t have them in my country”… well order them online. Yes, it gets expensive, but think of it as a price to pay for your manga addiction.
Look up the following things on Google to find online carriers of manga:
Amazon
Chapters/Indigo/Coles
Barnes and Noble
2. So you want to read it online. Here’s some places where you can view manga online:
onemanga.com
mangavolume.com
the anip server. google it.
mangatemple.com
thespectrum.net
3. For direct downloads (well at least, most of the time):
stoptazmo.com
Evil Empire manga (google it).
mangahelpers.com
mangatemple.com
the anip server
4. If none of the following work, here’s a great way to find tons of manga.
1. Go to mangaupdates.com
2. Use that handy little search box on the right and look for the manga and click on the result you want. the results are sorted by releases, manga titles, authors and scanlation groups.
3. You should appear at a nice helpful page that has a synopsis on the manga loads of other cool stuff. Now, on the left column, you’ll see a column that says “Latest Release(s)”. Click where it says “Search for all releases of this series”.
4. If you’re lucky, you’ll find releases of the series that have been scanlated into English, and there will be a DL link in the DL column, which you can just click on, and let the downloading begin.
most of the time, this is not the case. DL links of more popular/licensed are sometimes removed at request of the publishers. This is not the end of the world. click on the group name of the scanlator. you should be led to the group’s description. There are three ways to contact the group, or get to their releases: Forum URL, IRC channel, and a website link. Click on any of these links and follow through the site/channel to the download.
HELP! I can’t click on the name!
This release was probably scanlated by a mangahelpers.com member. go to their site and look around. If not, then, you’re out of luck.
HELP! There’s no contact info! (such is the case with Null) (They exist now!)
well… sucks to be you. The group probably doesn’t want too many leechers. If you can find out where they are, good job. but if you can, you’re probably not reading this. Also, groups like this are few and far between. Most of the newer groups want people to download their releases, especially speed scanners for shounen jump series who produce LQ scans just so they can feel all warm and fuzzy watching the download count rise.
IRC Channels:
1. First, if you want to access an IRC channel, download a client like mIRC or X-Chat (google it for a free download).
2. Once you have it, open it and connect to the server you want. also, pick a valid nick by typing it in the box inside the dialog that pops up. For example, the address for mangashare’s irc channel is #mangashare@irc.irchighway.net . the bolded part is the server.
3. After, join a channel by typing in the command prompt (using previous example) “/join #mangashare” . after, look at the topic you will see a whole bunch of useful stuff.
Anything that starts with a ! is a trigger. for example, if you join the #manga_hosterz channel, and you type in !pge, you can get the latest wallflower download. More often, you may need to type in !list. this will give you a list of fservs and bots you can download stuff from. every bot and fserv comes with instructions on what command prompt to type in if you want to do something.
HELP! It’s a torrent file!
You need a bittorrent client. Azureus or Utorrent are usually good picks. Download that (this usually happens instantaneously), and then when you download a torrent file, you open it using your client (which takes a lot longer). I don’t really want to explain what it does… cuz I’m too lazy and you don’t really need to know how it works, but if you’re curious, ask your local computer nerd. 
HELP! The newest chapter isn’t out and I’m want to read it NAO!
Chances are that the chapter isn’t even out in Japan, so you’ll have to wait until it’s released, scanned and edited. Also, many series are stopped due to licensing, so scanlators tend not to pick up series like this unless they’re stupendously popular (Bleach, Naruto and the like).
If you are fluent in Japanese, then head on down to places such as jCafe and michex raw manga, and you can usually find the Japanese versions of the manga there.
Lastly, if you’re just an impatient little bugger… leechers aren’t allowed to beg. Don’t be upset by the name, it’s only the truth if you read scans and don’t contribute to their production. Scanlators spend hours toiling over their work (unless you’re in a speed scan group, then it usually takes less time) and they do it all for free.
If you still want the process to go faster, try and join the scanlation group that scans your favourite manga.
The best way to do what you want is by learning Japanese translating the manga for a group. Trust me, if you’re good at translating and have decent English, groups will be clamouring for you.
If you can’t learn Japanese, the next best thing is to become an editor. Please note that this isn’t checking grammar. You are going to need to learn Photoshop. Some groups may teach you, but it’ll be very frustrating for them and you if you can’t even tell the difference between the clone tool and the pencil tool, so do a thorough exploring of Photoshop before attempting this job. What you do for the group is make the raws pretty and use the script the translator gives you and put the text in the appropriate places. I won’t go into detail, but this is a job that can be very frustrating and time consuming. But after translators, groups want people who can edit the next most.
Quality Checkers and Proofreaders are generally the least sought after positions. With speed scan groups, these positions are often omitted (hence why any experienced reader of scanlations dies a little inside while reading said speed scans).
The Quality Checker job varies from group to group. The most common trait is that you are able to spot editing errors (obvious stitch lines from double-pagers, untranslated bubbles/text, dust on pages etc) as well as spelling/grammatical errors. Some groups require to go through the .psd files and then fix the mistakes yourself (which means editing skills might be handy), while other groups just require you to provide a list of errors.
Now, you have no excuse to ask me where to find it.
If you found this helpful, please comment.
And if you are looking for “private” scanlation groups then howta fuc…… sorry, how you find them?
yea yea I know “suck to be you” and all the rest, but a proper answer would be nice.
thanks
thank you for your help it’s very useful:)
well. If they’re a private scanlation group, they probably don’t want to be found. You could google their name, but you probably wouldn’t know about the scan group if it’s private.
But it’s rare that scanlation groups would be private these days, since it’s a lot of effort to put together a group, scan in the manga, translate, edit and quality check chapters without having some sort of other motivation for doing it, which, since they’re not getting paid for it, is usually so that other people can read it and to stimulate interest in more obscure manga, etc. These things usually don’t happen for a group that is completely shut out from the rest of the internet.
You can find a lot of unlicensed manga that has been scanlated at mangatraders.com – you can download here or view it online. If you want to download it, you just have to register an account (which is very simple.)
Never gotten any viruses from it and all the files I’ve downloaded have worked.
They are all in the form of .zip files (don’t remember ever coming across any ,rar files but that’s not too important.)