Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-5407586-20140412165637/@comment-945885-20140416084222

I'm going to go ahead and explain a bunch of stuff all at once, since this thread is a bit disorganized:

Weekly Shonen Jump is published simultaneously in Japanese (print edition by Shueisha) and English (digital edition by Viz) on Mondays, apart from a few rare occasions when they go on sale on Saturday instead.

The "raws" (untranslated bootleg scans) and "scanlations" (translated bootleg scans) are illegally scanned and leaked online during the week prior to their official publication date (usually on Wednesday) by pirates who have access to the magazine before it officially goes on sale.

These individuals, sometimes called "raw providers," are able to get their hands on the magazines through various methods, which could include any of the following: stealing copies during the printing or shipping process, stealing copies from a convenience store before sale date, or purchasing copies from a convenience store that breaks the street date.

You may have also noticed in recent years that spoiler scans, spoiler scripts, and raw scans have been less prolific, with the English scanlations often appearing online several days before Japanese spoilers or raw scans. This is because Shueisha has gotten more aggressive about tracking and prosecuting domestic pirates in the last few years. As a result, the people who used to scan and post spoilers on Japanese message boards like Ni Channel have gotten a bit nervous about it doing it, and most scanlation groups have started using their own "raw providers" in Japan (in the past, raw providers would find and download the raws from Japanese file sharing services).

Now, as for the recent, extremely early spoilers arriving on Mondays: this is just a new marketing thing Shueisha is doing with their Jump Live and Jump Bookstore apps. Although they still haven't started publishing Weekly Shonen Jump digitally in Japan, they've added a sort of QR Code-like functionality to their apps that lets you take a photo of the "to be continued" section at the end of each chapter to view a preview of the next week's chapter.

Finally, Double Issues. Each year, every issue of Weekly Shonen Jump is numbered, beginning with No.1 in the first week of December and ending with No.52 in the last week of November. This is because there are 52 weeks a year.

However, due to publishing holidays like Oshogatsu, Golden Week, and the Obon Festival, there aren't actually 52 issues of Weekly Shonen Jump a year. If Jump is going to go on hiatus for a week due to a holiday, the issue before the holiday will be considered a Double Issue. All this means is that it's numbered twice to maintain the 52-weeks-a-year numbering scheme. For example, the first week of January will be issue No.6-7, the magazine won't be published during the second week of January, and it'll return on the third week of January with issue No.8.

Hope that clears some stuff up!