Yes, SJ Alpha is extremely silly, for back of a better word, in terms of a release. There is absolutely no reason it should be released two weeks later than in Japan.

That being said, it's so, so cheap. I read it for free online because I simply can't wait, BUT I still pay for the individual issues because it's only a dollar a week.

Why? Because you need to support the artists and people who work extremely hard to make this stuff and bring it here in the first place. Don't let the US manga industry die because of people that help you steal it for free.

For coming to our defense again. I appreciate it. There are reasons why we release it two weeks after it comes out in Japan. Of course, I can not tell you them, because I'd prolly get fired, but there are reasons.

Urian Brown - - King of the Forums and Fan of FrankyCenaur

Here's my theories as for the reasons:

1) The delay is deliberately done so that only one version (WSJA or WJ*) is available at a time.
WSJA releases on the same date as the corresponding WJ issue's cover date.
I don't know much about how cover dates get used in Japanese publishing, but if they're like the cover dates some weekly magazines over here, they are the last day the issues are on shop shelves. Add in the delay between a day happening in Japan and it happening in America, and the issues are likely already out of shops and on the way to be pulped by the time the WSJA containing the same chapters is enabled.

2) Add in that we get better, cleaner quality pages than those published in Japan, (Ever tried to read white text on a black background in a physical copy of WJ? Heck, even reading normal pages is tough sometimes...) especially for title pages which usually get covered in text in Japan, and I'd guess that...

3) Shueisha may be afraid of cannibalising the Japanese market due to ''reverse-scanlations'' -- if WSJA was released day and date with WJ, then someone could just edit the English version with the Japanese text, and hey, you would have cleaner manga than is even available in Japan, and none of the hours of scanning, rotating, cleaning low-quality print, patching pages back together, etc. and still ending up with a color spread full of text.

It also...
4) Enables better knowledge of how to handle things like cliffhanger lines that span multiple chapters, but Viz gets the chapters before they're even released in Japan, so that's not so much of a problem.

Though all in all these are but theories, though even for theories a confirmation or denial of the correctness of their content can be useful. ;>

That said, they're not unreasoned. In various places I've seen a similar 'foreign product cannot be better than Japan's' mentality, and would guess that the same is the reason that despite having digital-only Warped volumes, where added printing costs are no object, we still don't get color pages, or even color author illustrations. (At least in Bleach -- I haven't bought the others.)

I guess at least the digital releases provide a 'first check' before the print edition -- which some volumes certainly need -- Bleach volume 53 has three errors before the manga even starts(!):

(spoilered in case you want to attempt to find them yourself)

*WJ=Weekly Jump, the abbreviation the Japanese weekly Shonen Jump uses in itself.

I kind of get your point but I already do that by buying the volumes in stores.Also,since these volumes are cheaper the makers are getting less money so online seems less beneficial in both parts.