A site called bato.to shut down in January 2026, in a coordinated international takedown led by CODA, Kakao Entertainment, and a coalition of Japanese publishers. It was a pirate aggregator, and I’m not going to defend it. What I want to write about is something adjacent to it that also closed on the same day: an informal scanlation archive that doubled, in practice, as a de facto library of orphaned manga that doesn’t exist legally anywhere else, and probably never will.
That loss is not the pirate site. It’s the thing that quietly lived inside the pirate site.
The two Batotos
There are actually two Batotos in this story, and it’s important to keep them apart.
The first, batoto.net, was founded in January 2011 by an operator known as Grumpy. In January 2018 he closed it voluntarily. He wasn’t caught. He wasn’t sued. He was tired. His farewell post, preserved by ArchiveTeam, said, simply: I just don’t have the will to run this site anymore. I’m tired and I just can’t do this anymore. I haven’t had a single day when I could just freely take a day off. The site hosted around 20,000 comics at closure. On January 18, 2018, its image servers went dark.
The second site, bato.to, was founded in 2014 by an unrelated operator, and it kept the name. In November 2025 Shanghai public-security police detained its administrator, and by January 19, 2026, all sixty of its affiliated mirror sites were offline. Kakao Entertainment’s P.CoK anti-piracy arm had partnered with CODA and Japanese publishers to bring the complaint, alleging damages of approximately 770 billion yen, or $5.2 billion over 37 months. The administrator’s farewell, posted to the site’s Discord, read only: As for me, my journey ends here.
Both closures are legitimate on their own terms. The 2018 one is the story of a volunteer walking away. The 2026 one is the story of a criminal investigation. They bookend a decade.
How scanlation accidentally preserved orphaned manga
Between those two closures, a thing happened that no one in the industry planned for.
Start with the 2000s. Tokyopop, founded in 1996 as Mixx Entertainment, was for fifteen years the largest English-language manga publisher. In April 2011 it collapsed, and its licenses reverted to their Japanese rights holders. Some titles were rescued by Dark Horse (Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, Magic Knight Rayearth). Most weren’t. Series like Gakuen Alice (16 of 30 volumes translated), Battle Royale, King of Thorn, Gravitation, Trinity Blood, and half the CLAMP back catalog ended mid-run and have never been completed in English.
Central Park Media, which published a generation of BL and yuri manga through its Be Beautiful imprint — Embracing Love, Kizuna, the manga adaptation of Record of Lodoss War — filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in April 2009. The trustee liquidated. Most of its licenses were never picked up again.
Broccoli Books, a small US imprint that published shōjo and josei, announced its shutdown in November 2008 with fourteen series unfinished, including Kamui and Galaxy Angel II. ADV Manga was quietly killed off in mid-2007. Del Rey Manga folded into Kodansha USA at the end of 2010, and Kodansha’s rescue work wrapped by early 2013 — Suzuka, School Rumble, Nodame Cantabile never came back. DramaQueen, the small Houston BL and yuri publisher, stopped publishing in 2011 and went officially defunct in 2014.
At the same time, a peer-reviewed 2011 study by Lev Manovich and colleagues counted 883 manga series in active fan-translation in the fall of 2009 — roughly a million pages of text. The majority of those titles had no English publisher. They existed in English because a volunteer scanlation team had made them exist.
Scanlation sites became, by accident, the only searchable catalog of that material. Not because anyone designed them to. Because that was where the material lived.
The legitimate preservation landscape is thin
What exists in its place — the legal, institutional, long-term archive of English-translated manga — is vanishingly small.
The Internet Archive, the most institutional digital library in the world, spent four years defending a lawsuit brought by Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley over its Controlled Digital Lending program. The Second Circuit affirmed the ruling against the Archive in September 2024, and the Archive declined to petition the Supreme Court. More than half a million books were removed from its lending program as a result. Whatever it had been preserving is now, for most legal purposes, reserved to whoever still holds the rights.
The US Copyright Office, in its 2015 report, described the orphan-works problem as widespread and significant and as a frustration, a liability risk, and a major cause of gridlock in the digital marketplace. In the ten years since, no orphan-works legislation for books has passed Congress. The only statute enacted is the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which covers sound recordings.
Japan has done better, but not broadly. The Agency for Cultural Affairs has been running a manga-preservation program since fiscal 2010, now organized as the Manga Genga Archive Center, but its scope is original artwork by named artists — reader access is not really the point. Meiji University’s Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library holds around 410,000 items; the Kyoto International Manga Museum holds roughly 300,000. They are physical libraries in Japan. You go there to read.
J-Novel Club and a few other boutique licensors rescue specific older titles — Slayers light novels came back in 2020, thirty years after their original run — but those are commercial rescues of commercially viable series. Nothing in the current legal landscape is designed to do what a messy, unauthorized, volunteer-run scanlation archive accidentally did: keep a searchable record of commercial failures.
This has happened before
In March 2019, MySpace lost every song uploaded to it between 2003 and 2015, roughly fifty million tracks from fourteen million artists, during a server migration. There were no backups. Most of that music was never on Spotify or Apple Music, because the artists had not signed the deals that would put it there. It lived on MySpace. Now it doesn’t live anywhere.
In October 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities. By the final hour, thirty-eight million accounts were taken offline. A volunteer group called Archive Team managed to preserve, in the last forty-eight hours, more than two hundred thousand of those sites. That is under one percent of the original count. The rest is gone.
Both of those losses happened even though the material was, legally, fine. MySpace’s music and GeoCities’ pages were user-uploaded, not pirated. They disappeared anyway, because the platforms they depended on were not designed to last. The orphaned-manga layer of scanlation archives is the same category of loss, with one additional complication: the underlying activity was illegal.
What I actually think about scanlation
I want to be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not.
Scanlation was piracy. That is not in dispute. The 2026 bato.to shutdown was a legitimate law-enforcement action against a site that had caused approximately $5.2 billion in claimed damages to Japanese and Korean publishers. I support the industry’s right to prosecute it. I support creators being paid. I buy licensed volumes when I can find them, and I wait for official translations when I have to.
What I’m saying is that scanlation, as an activity, did two things at once. It distributed currently-in-print manga, which is straightforward piracy. And it also translated and informally archived commercially abandoned manga that the legitimate market had decided was not worth the cost of licensing. The first activity is wrong. The second activity was, in effect, volunteer preservation of material nobody was paid to preserve.
Noah Berlatsky, writing for the Center for Digital Ethics in 2013, quotes Erica Friedman — who ran Yuricon for fifteen years — describing early scanlation as a solution to an unmet demand. I think that’s the right frame. The demand is still unmet. The solution was always going to be fragile. The question for the next decade is whether any legitimate institution gets scoped to do the preservation work that this one did badly, and illegally, and in many cases uniquely.
Cory Doctorow, in Enshittification (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2025), calls the thing we need the right to exit: the ability to leave a service with your data, your network, and your purchases intact. That frame doesn’t cleanly apply to scanlation, because nobody owned any of it to begin with. But the adjacent principle does. Where the market has declined to preserve, someone has to. Either an academic library, a government archive, or a modified version of the Music Modernization Act’s orphan-sound-recording provision extended to books. None of those exist yet.
The one thing I can still keep
I cannot preserve the material itself. Neither can you. Preservation of the underlying files is a policy problem, and until someone solves it, the reader’s only sensible moves are to buy out-of-print volumes when they appear used, to support the publishers that do license older series (J-Novel Club, Seven Seas, Denpa), and to write directly to publishers when a series you care about has stopped in the middle.
What I can preserve is the record of what I read. Not the text. The memory. Which titles mattered, where I left off, what I was thinking when I read them.
For years I kept that record in a spreadsheet. I hated it. Columns that never fit the question I was asking. Sorting that broke whatever I’d tagged. Adding a chapter meant finding the right row. Looking for a title six months later was a small, recurring punishment.
Eventually the spreadsheet was inconvenient enough that I built my own solution. That’s what ManiShelf is — a small Mac app for the catalog, not the content. It doesn’t store chapters or pages. It stores a card for each title: description, characters, your own notes, your score, and the shelf you’ve put it on: backlog, currently reading, up next, finished, or any category you want to make. The data lives on your machine. If a platform disappears — legal, illegal, or somewhere in between — your shelf is still there, because it was never on the platform to begin with. No accounts, no cloud sync, no tracking. If you’d like to take a look, the app lives at oitoana.dev/manishelf.
It doesn’t bring back the manga that closed. It makes sure the next time a site dies, you still know what you were reading there, and what it meant to you.
Common questions
Did Batoto actually shut down? Yes, twice, as two different sites. The original batoto.net, founded by an operator called Grumpy, closed voluntarily in January 2018 because of founder burnout. A different site named bato.to, founded in 2014 by an unrelated operator, was shut down in a coordinated January 2026 law-enforcement action led by CODA and Kakao Entertainment.
Is scanlation legal? No. It involves unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted work. Out-of-print status does not alter that; rights typically revert to the original Japanese publisher rather than entering the public domain, and they remain there until the rights holder explicitly releases them or the copyright term expires — which for any modern manga is still decades away.
What can I legally read if a series is out of print? In Japan: Meiji University’s Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library or the Kyoto International Manga Museum. For US readers: used volumes on AbeBooks and ThriftBooks, plus licensed backlist rescues from J-Novel Club, Seven Seas, Denpa, and Kodansha USA. Some older manga has been reissued in omnibus format — worth checking once a year.
What would actually fix this? Orphan-works legislation for books. Congress has passed it for sound recordings — the Music Modernization Act of 2018 — but never for text. Until it does, the legal landscape has no general mechanism to make out-of-print and rights-orphaned books available to readers.
Will another scanlation site just replace bato.to? Probably, at least in the short term, and probably followed by another takedown. Enforcement alone doesn’t close the preservation gap — it moves the gray-market infrastructure somewhere harder to find, which is a different outcome from solving the underlying problem. The durable fix is on the preservation side: orphan-works legal reform for books, and academic-library institutions scoped to keep a searchable catalog of the works the commercial market has decided to let go.
- Anastasiia