What I meant is that there's a large electronic reading scene for both American and Japanese comics. Both have had large pirate scenes for decades, but recently more and more legal avenues have popped up too for reading electronically.

I'm not aware of such a culture around francophone comics.

And to the sibling comment: I'd say in the origin countries the same is true. In Japan, kids buy physical manga at the convenience store. In the US, we go to the comic book store and pick up a batch of new releases. Yet somehow both of those have large communities of people scanning/translating/occasionally licensing the works. I wonder why it's different with French ones!