[X] My Assistant

New Proposal – We will buy and scan the books that you want, without any cost to you, if you will edit our scans.

Summary: Despite little communication in the forum, our group is doing very well and we are hard at work producing scans regularly. We are seeking new members who can help us by receiving our rough “raw” scans and “editing” them, namely by using a program such as Adobe PhotoShop to rotate, crop, apply levels and otherwise clean and improve our scans so that they may be shared on the E-Hentai forum. In return, not only can you join our group and not only have the access to our expertise on Japanese comics and the purchasing and scanning of them, but we will purchase and scan the books that you want as compensation!

Status Update

We first started this thread on this forum proposing the scan group and have not posted much more afterwards. We’re sorry for the long absence and lack of communication, but we thank everyone who has made my group a big success! After two years of first announcing the group’s activity on this forum, we have increased membership and orders and we are not easily able to count the number of books that we've scanned due to the large volume of orders.

Location of Scans

Some of you may be wondering, if you check the uploads under this user account name, tooecchi, how we can say that the group is so successful since there has been a long delay of uploads under this name. The reason for this is what we allow the purchasers of books that we scan to upload themselves under their own name and to receive credit themselves. This group's goal is to provide scans and share the scans and not to promote ourselves or our name. Some of the books that you have downloaded from other persons' accounts may actually have been our scans.

Future of the Group

We are actually delayed on our many scans and are now looking to expand our group to include more members and more activity. Right now, we are in a great need of what we call "editors" to help us process what we call "raw" scans so that they may be released. I put the words "editors" and "raw" in quotations since we use the terms a bit differently than many of you may be familiar with. When we scan, the immediate file generated is what we call "raw". "Editing" this "raw" file involves opening it and transforming it in one or more image file processing program such Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, etc. We use these tools to make changes to the "raw" scan generated on our computers by our scanners to greatly improve their appearance before we upload them to E-Hentai. A group that specializes in creating scanlations would start with the files that we release after our editing. Our final product becomes the raw files for the scanlators, as has been the case with some of our releases.

We are now seeking people to help us with our editing!

We are looking for dedicated people with the stamina, dedication and love of comics to help us release many more high-quality scans at a much faster rate than before. We are receiving over 200 new books of our own purchases and are gaining more customers as well. Unlike other groups that simply credit people by name, and often provide nothing more, who participate in their groups, we are willing to compensate the people who help us edit our scans. As those who have followed this group may know, we are able to locate many books, even rare ones, and that we are not afraid to scan a wide variety of genres. If you are willing to put in the work and dedication of editing our scans, we believe it is only fair that we compensate you in some real way and not merely with a cheap “thank you” on a website, blog, live journal post, or a file included with the scanned book that contains your name.
If you are willing to help us release the books that we want to scan, then we want to help you also release the books that you would purchase had you the ability to do so.

How it works

We are constantly producing scans of our customers’ purchases and our own purchases. If you wish to join our group, then we will give you our rough completely unprocessed and unedited scans as they are produced by our scanners for you to work on. We will tell you what we would like done when it comes to editing and give you explicit help on some techniques that we use that may or may not be known to you. We are always looking to improve our edits and will allow our editors to use their own good judgment, in most cases, to decide what looks best. After you edit the book, you must send the edited files back to us and then we will check your edits against the book. At this time, we check for flaws in our own initial scans and for missing pages. If something is wrong, we will send you our corrections and possibly additional files to edit. Then, you will resend those corrects to us for a final approval. Finally, the scan may be shared online and we will consider your work to count towards the purchase of the books that you wish for us to buy and scan for you.

Although we do not know how exactly we will compensate you for the books that you would like us to buy and scan for you (in the sense of how many edits shall be exchange for what a cost or amount of books), we are a fair group of people. First, we want to distinguish between the scans of our customers and the scans of our own books that we purchase. When we scan for our customers, we receive a payment from our customers in the form of money. When we buy our own books and scan them, of course, we do not receive any payment. To start this process, we will not be giving any scans of books from our paying customers to our editors. We will only be providing you with scans of the books that we have purchased ourselves which we purchase and scan without receiving any financial profit.

Second, we understand that not every edit is equal in value. Some scans are much harder to edit than others. Some books are printed badly and can benefit far more than other better printed books with editing. Of course, such editing takes a lot more time. Books with subtle shading can be very hard to edit as well and are often harder to edit than those that consist of mostly or only line work. When we consider how we will compensate you with the books of your choices, we want to consider the time and effort it has taken you to edit a particular book and not merely the amount of pages.

Third, some of you may be interested in receiving extremely rare or expensive books. Such books may be so hard to find that you should give up on them for at the immediate time and instead make requests of easier books. While doing so and working with our group, we will teach you how we search for books and thereby let you continually hunt the possibly rare book that you want. If and when the book appears, we may be in a position to buy it, assuming our relationship with you as an editor is good, and we can then buy it upon your providing the link to us. Please do not consider a book as rare unless you speak with us first about it as we have often met people who consider a book as rare only to easily find it.

When we purchase and scan a book for you in return for your efforts as an editor, we expect you to edit the book and return your edits for final approval just like for our own scans. We also require that the edited scan be made available and shared freely. You may share it apart from our group if you wish under whatever name that you would like it to be shared under, but we only ask that it indeed be shared.

In closing, although we are not sure how we will negotiate a fair exchange between purchasing and scanning books for our editors and the edits that they provide to us, we are open to suggestions on this forum or in private discussion with our potential editors. It may be best to say that we wish for a fair transaction for us and for you, our editors.

What is editing?

Or what do we mean by “editing”? We use the term “editing a scan” to refer to the process by which we take a scan file that our scanner creates on our PC and cleaning it using image editing software programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro, IranView, etc. by themselves or, more often, in conjunction with one another. We use such functions as rotate, crop, desaturate, curves, stretch, resize, and others. By “editing”, we do not mean to imply that we censor the comic in any way. We also try not to introduce too much of our own artificiality in our scans. As examples, neither do we perform more advanced image “enhancements” such as colorization nor de-censoring as part of our editing. If we will do a merging of two pages into one file, we may have to redraw parts of the middle but we also release the scans that lack the merging with the redrawing on them in our attempt to present a more authentic scan release.

Example of editing

Please scroll down to see an unedited raw image contrasted with its edited counterpart, and take note that it the images shown have been reduced by half of their original size.

(IMG:[cdn.pbrd.co] https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/1zj1YPQL.jpg)

This post has been edited by tooecchi: Jun 29 2015, 03:50

No Experience Necessary

Some of you may be thinking “I have a strong desire to join your group, but I don’t know how to edit scans.”Don’t worry. As long as you have the time and are willing to learn and put forth the required effort, we will get you setup and teach you how to edit. We can provide easier books to edit at first so that you may learn and get a good understanding of editing before we provide more difficult book scans for you to do. Of course, you’ll also need an adequately powerful PC, but you don’t need a lot of power to edit scans, and we think that most of you who are reading this probably already have an adequate PC.

An Interesting and Unusual Community

We are broad-minded people who like a variety of subjects and authors. Unlike other online Japanese comic (manga)/ illustration fan-groups, scan-groups, scanlation-groups, etc. that are focused only one specific fandom such as say parodies of a particular series or even of a particular pairing of characters from a particular anime/ manga or a particular sexual theme such as futanari, our purchases reflect us as people. We hunt, purchase, and scan a wide variety of books which are not usually found mixed together by members of other groups. We view Japanese comic art as a large family of various branches and are not interested of keeping all of it divided into narrow, segregated groups that do not join together to any larger whole. As a result, you can easily express what you like with us. By working with us, you can accomplish your own goals while helping us accomplish our own goals as well. We are a group that works hard and gets a lot done and prefers the fruit of our labor to idle talk, unlike other groups that seem to use more of their efforts to consider one grand project after another only to accomplish none of them.
Furthermore, we are also interested in other efforts that our editors may wish to provide within our. For example, we do not have a blog or any presence in social media. We would happily allow a new member to have a lot of freedom in this matter if he or she would like to engage other fans of comic scans in such a way. Moreover, we are also open to other suggestions that may further our main goals of finding, scanning, and sharing comics.

People that scan comics usually do more than simply scan

Not everyone is able to easily scan, and scanning is only one part of a larger whole. First, the book to be scanned needs to be located for sale. Second, it needs to be purchased from a usually Japanese-language only shop. Third, it needs to be shipped out from Japan and sometimes this involves contracting a middle-man known as a deputy service as many stores or individual auction sellers do not ship out of Japan. Fourth, the book needs to be received successfully past customs of your nation. Fifth, the person who is scanning needs to own the appropriate hardware, e.g. scanner, PC, etc., and the corresponding knowledge to produce a high quality scan. Of course, after this, the scans need to be edited and finally shared online, which are steps that you, as our editors, can contribute to us, rather than doing all of the steps yourself.

Why should you join our group as an editor?

First, we are in a good position of being able to receive books easily and efficiently from Japan and to be able to scan them without the anxieties or pressures some of you may have. Some of you may be far too embarrassed to buy say your favorite furry, yuri, yaoi, S&M or whatever other kinky theme / genera books that appeal to you and have it shipped to your home or place of business. For some of you, receiving such an item would be very troublesome and best to avoid. Furthermore, for some of you on this forum, such items may be seized by customs and even lead to troubling legal action.

Second, we have roughly 15 combined years of proven experience of locating, purchasing, scanning, editing, and releasing scans. Many of you who go to this forum may be great fans of comics and have wished to purchase and even scan books but do not know where to start. By working with us, you do not need to go through the great troubles and efforts that we had to when we started but can increase your productivity and output by becoming a member of our group.

Third, some of you lack the financial ability to purchase comics. Some of you reading this may very well be unemployed Hikikomori, NEET, or students (of adult age, of course) while others may have employment but live in nations where the exchange rate to that of Japan makes purchasing comics unusually expensive. Whatever the reason, if you have more time than money, you can invest your time and effort with us and be rewarded with the scans of books of your choosing without having to pay for them yourself.

Fourth, we are willing to teach you how to edit scans and will provide you with what you need to get to work and be a productive editor. We can make ourselves easily available for training and assistance.

Fifth, by editing with us you also can become members of small but effective group of stimulating, dedicated, Japanese comic and anime lovers who will treat you with more respect and concern than many other groups made of inexperienced, arrogant, and foolish people who speak a lot and get little accomplished. If you have other ideas for what this group can do based on your personal preferences, we are willing to listen and to allow you to have the freedom and power to possibly do such work and contribute in ways that you may find rewarding.

Sixth, we are perhaps the only group that is willing to actually buy the requested book for our editors as a reward rather than simply thanking them with words.

This post has been edited by tooecchi: Jun 29 2015, 03:55

That big a lack of editors? Sadly, I'm only able to work in bursts and the most works I want scanned are stupidly rare. Good luck to your group with this endeavor.