Hey everyone!

Ziggy here, and I’m long overdue for this post, but I’ve been finding it extremely difficult to sit down and put my thoughts together while having a lot of due dates and a lot of changes going on in my life.

I’m here with the announcement of a lot of different things, so bear with me if I get a little lengthy!

I know I had stressed and stressed and stressed that we here at Soba-Scans would continue to provide scanlation of doujinshi on site for you all, but after having time to really sit back and think on things, it’s come down to group decision that we will no longer be distributing releases here on Soba-Scans aside from announcements and various goodies to share with you all.

However, with that being said – there has been a lot of discussion amongst the group, and I wanted to let you know that a large portion of the staff will be merging over with Unlimited Fap Works and once in a while Unlimited Translation Works. Yumeko-chan still intends to translate doujinshi and various other titles (she’s been busy translating lately!) and she’s even going to Japan this month and plans to pick up a bunch of new material. Any donations that were given to us for doujinshi will be transferred over and will not go to waste.

Unlimited Fap Works will be jump started again and everyone will be pleased to find out that The Secret Devil-chan will still continue to live and be provided on their website. You can check out the chapter here.

If you aren’t familiar with UFW or UTW (I’ll be surprised if you aren’t!), this is a team of people who back in the day encouraged us to start Soba-Scans. Nikon was my senior and taught me the ins and outs of editing and Raze offered advice and support with translation. So needless to say we have a great relationship with these guys.

A lot of you may be questioning “Well, if some of the original staff from Soba-Scans are going to continue doing scanlation, why not just do it here?” and that’s a great question!

LD and I have been key members who did coordinating, organizational work, and a majority of the translation and editing. Scanlation is very much an assembly line of work among people, and it takes a lot of organization and planning to make sure each and every project is finished. With LD moving away from scanlation for newer and more exciting things regarding localization for licensed manga to share with everyone, I too have been finding out I will need to move away from scanlation.

When I originally started to learn how to edit I was interested in it mostly as an escape and a reason to procrastinate from my coursework in college. I was in a program I had little to no desire to be in, so a good distraction was in order! This was before LD and I even met on Fakku, where he was simply looking for an editor to help him with his pet project Ring x Mama. He and I got together on the project, and things just grew and grew and grew with Soba-Scans. I ended up quitting school for a while due to poor grades and lack of interest. I didn’t want to be wasting money while I was lost for an idea of what I wanted to do for a career.

I think a lot of people forget that we’re all young normal adults at various parts of our lives with different circumstances. Some of us married, some of us graduated from Uni, some of us students, some of us looking for a career, and some of us (me!) trying to figure out still what we wanted to do with our lives.

Because of this experience with Soba-Scans and opportunity with Project-H with editing manga I had made the decision to go back to school after almost 3 years. On top of that I’m following my heart with my passion in graphic design instead of being in a major that seemed ‘safe’ like Business Management (the study I dropped out of).  So thanks Soba-fans! Without people following us and encouraging us to continue with our work, I may have never discovered this passion of mine. I really do owe it to you all, and even after these years, every time we do a release I’m there at my computer refreshing pages on Fakku and Soba-Scans reading the new comments!

With starting school here, working full time in my day job, and doing series for Project-H – it’s too much stress, and not fair to you all to have to wait around for me to have time to coordinate a bunch of releases of doujinshi for you on Soba-Scans. So that’s where UFW is going to come on board. Some staff from here and their staff there are going to join together and fight on~

Meanwhile, here at Soba-Scans we’re going to always keep you all updated with what we’re working on with Project-H or even other exciting series we know about. A lot of you followed us because of our taste in hentai titles, so you may be interested in what we work on for print so you can buy it with confidence. We also always have information and neat things we’ve always wanted to share with you all – so we hope you’ll stick around while we share news and announcements.

We will always be rooting for the mangaka’s success around the world, and pushing for the ability to have access to hentai titles in English (and even other languages!) that are affordable and high in quality for the avid fans. Working with Project-H, I have experienced that the staff there have the same passion and I’m very happy that the manga is handled with such care from the very beginning to the very end.

I know we’ve been talking about Velvet Kiss and Harumi Chihiro for a long while – but as LD had mentioned, there’s worse situations we could be in! Right now we’re working on two of her series and who knows what we’ll be working on in the future!

Now regarding this doujinshi raffle: (Deadline is 7/28/12)

Yumeko is in Japan as I speak, and we don’t have the amount we’d like to have in order to stock up while she’s in the country to get her hands on physical copies. So I’ve put together a raffle for you all to get a chance to win some prizes while making it so more material is available.

The first place prize is going to be Volumes 1-3 of Kanojo de Ippai by Manabe Joji. Volume 1 was debinded and rebound by me, so you will notice some wear on it, but it’s functional as a normal book for you to flip through. Volumes 2 and 3 are brand new.
Requirements to win these volumes:
You must donate at least $10 US dollars. Every $10 donated, your name will appear in the raffle.  You will have the choice to select a doujinshi if you wish. You may not switch out one volume for a doujinshi, the 3 volumes come as a set. So you must either choose 1 doujinshi or the 3 volumes.

Runner ups will get a choice of these doujinshi: (if more than one person picks the same doujinshi, it’ll be decided by “guess a # between 1 and 10″)
(K-ON Full color yuri)  This was debinded and rebound, there is some wear on the spine from the heat effecting the cover, but it is readable and otherwise looks new
(Infinite Stratos group sex)
(Puella Magi Madoka Magica futanari)
(K-ON/Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossover parody, forced, not vanilla)
(Panty & Stocking w/Garterbelt  nothing out of the ordinary of what you’d expect lol..) This one despite new, the front of the cover has some dried glue from another page that had been scanned that was placed on top of it by mistake while the page still had warm glue. So I promise the dried residue on the page is nothing to be concerned about!

Requirements to be win these doujinshi:
You must donate at least $5 US dollars. Every $5 donated, your name will appear in the raffle. If you donate $10 or more you will eligible for the complete volume set.

Non-US residents are eligible too!

All donations will go to Yumeko while she is in Japan to purchase doujinshi for UFW’s staff and any staff members from here going over there as well. They have several projects in the works right now and looking forward to jump starting again for you all. I encourage all of your support for them and to check them out: http://ufw.arinashi.com/

Thanks again guys!

Related posts:

1. The Secret Devil-chan! Chapter 7
2. The Secret Devil-chan Chapter 8
3. The Secret Devil-chan!
4. The Secret Devil-chan: Chapter 4
5. The Secret Devil-chan! Chapter 6