Amusingly enough (and predictably entirely unmentioned in this article), the history of (official) manga translation in the US is a history of the official publishers slowly and grudgingly coming around to doing what the fan translators have been doing all along.

This was a really great read, thank you. I've been collecting and reading translated mamga since 2000, and I have a ton of manga that was flipped to read left-to-right before publishers diched that style. It's very cool to read about the reasons how and why they did so. :)

I just went back and reread akira, the English head-on version. There's sections where they describe the process for translating and reversing the original for l-t-r reading, in English. Pretty cool