calgarasA friend was asking about the subject, so I thought I’d make a very involved post explaining all you need to know about where to get the One Piece manga.
The single best place to get the manga from it to download it from the Bakabt torrent. It contains the first 68 volumes in the highest quality that they are currently available. It’s important to use the torrent because the Alabasta arc is currently being retranslated from its old horrendous quality into something much better, by the group nitoryu-scans, who have currently redone volumes 5 through 23. Online readers don’t have most, if any, of these new volume releases, and almost always significantly lower the quality of the pages and add watermarks (Mangapanda, for example, is notorious for adding their huge panda watermark to every single page they host).
Batoto is one site that doesn’t resize pages or add watermarks, and they host the scans done by the group Powermanga (formerly Mangarule, although their star translator recently left, unfortunately) from chapter 585 all the way to the present. If you want to read the second half of Punk Hazard and Dressrosa (which are not included in the Bakabt torrent yet), Batoto’s site is the best place to go for translation and scan quality. (However, it doesn’t host the whole OP manga, as they only host scans from groups whose permission they have, hence why their site is best for using for early chapters and post time skip chapters.)
If you’d like to see some side-by-side examples of the differences between Powermanga’s scans and an online reader’s scans, here are some comparisons:
So yeah, Bakabt and Batoto are the best places to go to get the One Piece manga in its highest quality. However, keep in mind that some parts only have low quality scans available: volumes 24, 25, and 30 to 39. For these volumes (which cover Jaya and the second half of Skypiea to the start of Enies Lobby), everyone has to make do with the relatively low quality Null scans for the time being.
Happy reading!
