Christmas Toycon 2010 and Toycon 2011

Just found this out - the 5th Christmas Toy Fair 2010 will be held on December 17-19, 2010 at the SM Megatrade Hall 3, SM Megamall. For those who are interested to setup booths, please see this link: http://toyconph.com/blog/2010/10/28/5th-christmas-toy-fair-2010-registration-now-open/

Also worth noting, June 2011 will mark the 10th year for Toy Con, and apparently they will occupy 3 Megatrade Halls for two days! See you there--(I hope!)

One Manga shuts down

"There is an end to everything, to good things as well."

It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July '10).

So what next? We're not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear..

This message will pop up when you first visit OneManga.com today. In just a matter of minutes my online friends shared this surprising news: OneManga will now stop publishing free manga scanlations. This is due to the Japanese and US manga publishers' advise that they will file lawsuits against sites that offer free scanlation of their works. [more info here]

Due to this, OM is one of the biggest scanlation websites that voluntarily stopped operations. One Manga, we're sad to see you go. I'm afraid the other sites are next. But when we look at it on the manga makers' side, they do have the right to act on their declining sales due to these free scanlations sites.

I'm really sad about this though. Here in my country, it's hard to have access to actual mangas. If you do find one it's either too expensive or outdated. The next possible way is to order mangas online, which is both hard and expensive. Unfortunately for many of us, we can't afford it.

So I guess we will need to say goodbye to Fairy Tail and other good mangas soon =(