I don't really see it as an issue of service and adaption, at least not completely. To me it feels more like an issue of availability, as in since it's available for free, why would I pay for it?
The motivation for people to get stuff legally should be to get a good product, to pay for the work of other people that they enjoy reading and to keep the manga they like coming.
From what I've seen, scanlations are most of the time of lower quality compared to the legal stuff.
Scanlations are quicker to come out, but that's a given, they have no one to respond to, they don't have to wait for legal paperworks nor for contracts to be signed. They don't have to wait for sales to reach a certain point before the publisher can go ahead and get a new volume printed or new volumes licensed.
Adapting can only go so far. How do you adapt to combat people that put out scanlated chapters before they're even out in Japan?
Same-day releases are a cool concept, but that only works for something that's planned to be released on more markets from the on-set (like the digital ShonenJump with a fixed number of stories), it's not something that can be extended to everything in a niche market like the manga one.
You have a publisher who had to decide if they wanted to license a new title, or have one OOP reprinted. They couldn't have both. The money simply doesn't seem to be there for the level of adapting that some expect from the manga world.
Personally I've shifted my opinion of scanlations from helping the manga market to scanlations willingly damaging the manga market, as I can't see it any other way when time and time again scanlators refuse to drop licensed works and when they're asked to specifically, they make subgroups to keep scanlating.
This mostly hinges on the idea that Manga is a physical market in NA, but if there's anything we can take out of scanlations numbers is that's no longer the case, we're dealing with a digital market.
Publishers need to move into the same space and focus on the digital market, they need to rethink their entire approach and aim at offering translations of as many series as possible at earliest possible date, ideally covering entire magazines, if possible doing contracts at a magazine level instead of individual series level. Lower costs due to the lack of physical releases would allow for bigger risks as well.
The way they negotiate licenses would need to change, and that's really the biggest challenge to overcome due to their Japanese counterpart.
Its true that you can't beat early releases, not unless you convince Japanese publishers to allow you to release early, but, and this is an honest question, are there many non-jump series suffering from this issue?
As much as it sucks, the idea of manga as a physical product is outdated in NA, it will work for a small subset of popular mangas, but the market has move forward. Scans offer more mangas, closer release dates to the original releases and do so in a digital format.
Until publishers aim to do the same, they will be playing a losing game by trying to sell to a market that's simply not there.
The very minimum would be to offer digital releases of any series they pick up, which most american publishers aren't doing.
