Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-4688597-20140416230405/@comment-945885-20140422225229

Lately, I think the raws have probably been purchased -- not that it makes them any less illegal. And the Western scanlators are getting their scans from their own (private) contacts much earlier, probably because there's less risk of them getting in trouble.

I'm not sure why the latest issue of WSJ (No.21) hasn't made it online yet, since the issue was released on Monday. Either the bootleggers were delayed, couldn't afford it with the increased sale tax (haha) or were headed off by Shueisha's lawyers / the authorities / threats. Japanese bootleggers tend to be pretty skiddish, it seems to me.

The 674 spoilers are from WSJ's ongoing promotion. According to this page, you can only choose to preview one page of the next chapter, and some pages are declared NG (no good / off limits) by the editors. So what most likely happened is one or more people managed to get all of the preview pages by doing the preview multiple times. So that's why it's almost the complete chapter.

The smartphone preview thing is probably an attempt by Shueisha to curtail spoilers and leaks by giving people an official alternative (which requires both the physical purchase of a magazine and the installation of their bookstore app). They probably also want people to preview different pages and then share/discuss what they saw, to generate more buzz and hype, so it becomes a sort of transmedia puzzle for fans to put together and speculate about. Pretty smart, really.