[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) - All-you-can-read manga s...
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Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) - All-you-can-read manga subscription
Hey there, we're Abbas, Evan, Adela, Krystyn, and Ken from Azuki
(https://www.azuki.co/). We're a subscription service for reading
digital manga (Japanese comics) on Web, iOS, and Android. With
Azuki you can easily read official translations of the latest
chapters or dive into our back catalog of hit manga and hidden
gems. We're in a golden age of manga. More and more series are
getting translated and released in English, but publishers still
can't keep up with fan demand. Print shortages due to Covid and the
long production pipeline of print books mean that lots of series
take months or years to get official releases in English. And
believe it or not, print sales still dwarf ebook sales for English
manga! We are huge manga fans and wanted a way to easily access
lots of new manga without filling up our bookshelves, paying for
thousands of individual ebooks, or resorting to piracy. That last
one is important, since manga piracy is still rampant, and we
wanted to make it as easy as possible to support creators by
reading official releases. Most of us worked together at
Crunchyroll (the anime streaming service) where we learned a lot
about how to grow a subscription product and an associated fan
community. Evan also worked for many years as an anime/manga
journalist and podcaster, and Adela had experience in manga
localization. All that led to Azuki. For a single subscription fee
($4.99/month), we offer unlimited access to high-quality official
translations of new chapters from more than 20 ongoing series
including EDENS ZERO, The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the
Apocalypse, and The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting. Most new
chapters are available in English at the same time as they go on
sale in Japan! The subscription also includes a huge back catalog,
with hit series like Attack on Titan and Fairy Tail, and acclaimed
indie manga like Pop Life and Children of Mu-Town. All of this is
available to read in our apps on Web, iOS, and Android, with series
progress and reading lists shared across the apps. Fans love us
compared to other manga reader options because of the easy access
to the latest chapters (no need to buy individual ebooks for each
one), our diverse catalog featuring series from six different
publishers, and our dedication to presenting manga pages in the
highest possible quality. By the way, there are over 150 currently
running manga magazines in Japan, with each usually releasing
either weekly or monthly. Each magazine serializes anywhere from
five to over 30 series on a chapter-by-chapter basis. That's a huge
amount of comics, and only a fraction of it makes its way to
English-speaking markets right now. We need more! The most popular
and visible genres of manga are action and fantasy adventure
(things like EDENS ZERO and Four Knights of the Apocalypse), but
there are a lot of fans looking for other genres, especially
romance (A Sign of Affection) and comedy (Grand Blue Dreaming). We
were a little surprised by how popular some of those series ended
up being! Our customers primarily use us to read new manga
chapters released simultaneously with Japan, known as "simulpubs"
in the manga industry. But we also offer community features to let
fans talk about their favorites, in comment threads and in our
official Discord. It's been really cool meeting these fans and
watching a community grow up around the service. In terms of our
business model, we charge a monthly subscription. We pay out
royalties to publishers based on how much each user reads of each
series, and keep the remainder to pay for our operations. We'd
love for you to give Azuki a try! Most series have the first few
chapters available for free (with ads), and there's a 30-day free
trial so you can try our Premium membership before you pay
anything. We seriously appreciate any feedback you have about the
service and how we can improve, and we look forward to talking
manga in the comments. Thank you!
Author : BasouKazuma
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-03-25 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
| rodiger wrote:
| Looks awesome! Slight naming collision but pretty different
| industries. https://www.azuki.com/
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| We actually launched Azuki a while before this project started!
| mistahenry wrote:
| If you get Berzerk, I'll sign up :) that's what I'm looking to
| read next, one way or another.
|
| I really enjoy the Shonen Jump app on my iPad for reading One
| Piece so I'm definitely keen on a service like this with an
| expanding catalog!
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| I'm a Berserk fan myself and got the brand tattooed on my neck
| so getting that would be awesome!
| kaveet wrote:
| https://www.azuki.co
| dang wrote:
| Added above. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| exdsq wrote:
| Cool idea! I'll sign up. Few UX things:
|
| * The page scroll at the bottom of my iOS Safari browser doesn't
| work
|
| * Right to left makes sense for Japanese but if I'm reading it in
| English I'd expect the scroll to be Left to Right
|
| My free chapter if it's series specific -
| https://www.azuki.co/series/edens-zero/read/c607c182-5317-4e...
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Do you read manga? The books, in English, are still right to
| left pages.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| Finally! Its been incredibly frustrating with the current model
| of paying $7-$10 for a manga volume. Gettign caught up with a
| series can cost over a hundred dollars vs being able to stream
| the anime with just crunchy roll or netflix. It just didn't make
| sense to me that the anime would be cheaper to consume given the
| relative production costs.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Unsure if you're doing this already or have plans to, but I
| highly recommend creating a group account on Mangadex and put the
| upload links in for each Manga you have license to. This way you
| can leverage the large audience of Mangadex and the apps that use
| it's API , and advertise directly to your possible target
| audience for free. As a legal means of reading manga in the US
| Mangadex is your friend, not your enemy.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Greats minds think alike! We are putting our free chapter links
| on MangaDex and will be putting more there as we get more free
| chapters.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Oh, I've been hoping for something like this for ages! I signed
| up.
|
| One thing that sticks out about the UI is the default one page at
| a time loading. This feels a bit weird for a paid service,
| compare it to Mangaplus, which is also official (although free.)
| I'm glad you have the option to switch, though.
|
| Your reader works with the browser's built in zoom. This is great
| for accessibility, especially because so many readers don't.
| Thank you!
|
| If I add a series to my list, will I get email notifications when
| it updates? That's what I want the most.
|
| A 30 day free trial feels excessive, but I'll happily accept it.
|
| Overall, looks great! Hope to see more series soon.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Yep, if you add a series to your list you will get email
| notifications for updates! And, if you're on Android, you will
| get push notifications (which is also coming to iOS and Web).
|
| Noted on the default reader mode. Would you prefer it default
| to Vertical scrolling mode?
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Great!
|
| I would prefer vertical by default, yes. I tend to associate
| one page at a time with ad-heavy sites that are trying to
| save on server costs/bandwidth.
| mikhailt wrote:
| Any chance you could add full screen mode on the web app?
| rc-1140 wrote:
| > Most of us worked together at Crunchyroll
|
| Are you a hybrid publisher translating these in-house, or are you
| a middleman service working with publishers who are handling the
| translation?
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Currently we are a middleman service for other publishers but
| we are looking into in-house translation.
| rc-1140 wrote:
| To be honest, hearing that you're a middleman with a feature-
| rich client is _very_ appealing. I was on the fence before
| your response but now I 'm way more comfortable knowing my
| subscription would be used to further the service and
| negotiations with publishers, rather than gamble upon your
| company's Crunchyroll heritage with regard to translations
| (not a good thing).
| livinglist wrote:
| are u guys using Flutter for your mobile app?
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| We are using native Kotlin/Java for Android and Swift for iOS
| as we have a dedicated engineer for each platform!
| livinglist wrote:
| that's quite impressive, not so many startups can afford to
| do this
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Aw thanks! We believe in building products that will last
| and be scalable so we wanted to do as much as we can to
| keep things sustainable. That's why we sought out founders
| with dedicated Android and iOS experience.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Great idea for a product. Glad this exists! If anything, you guys
| should be charging more for this service!
| toyg wrote:
| Calm down - we're in the middle of a massive upward
| inflationary spiral across the Western world. I know I'd love
| to buy this, but I'm already double-guessing myself on whether
| it's worth $60 a year...
| slap_shot wrote:
| This is off topic but as someone who grew up in a household
| that made their living selling things in markets, where
| prices were openly negotiated, I just want to share a
| thought:
|
| While you're absolutely allowed to express that a product may
| not be worth a price, it seems tactless to make such a
| comment on a thread where the founders are announcing their
| product. I understand you're replying to someone who feels
| the product could command a higher price, but to say you're
| double guessing the price just seems like something you
| should keep to yourself.
|
| I can only imagine the amount of work this team puts into
| crafting these translations - similar to how family put a lot
| of work into the goods they sold.
| toyg wrote:
| The irony: people spend their lives telling each other
| semi-formalized bullshit about something not being worth
| the asking price, as part of ancient rituals meant to make
| both parties feel like they got the better of each other,
| but god forbid one might actually say out loud that they
| _honestly_ think something might not be worthy to them.
|
| I honestly wouldn't have said anything, if it weren't for
| people trotting out the "charge more" mantra - which at the
| moment _really_ is insensitive towards people struggling to
| keep the lights on.
|
| To people living and breathing manga, I'm sure this is a
| steal; _to me_ , for my circumstances, it's a nice-to-have
| that may or may not be be worth the expense. This has
| nothing to do with the quality of the product - a Ferrari
| is a sweet piece of machinery, but _to me_ it 's not worth
| the sacrifices I would have to make to afford it.
| shmatt wrote:
| I imagine a post-seed startup founder is actually VERY
| interested in peoples negative opinions on their product,
| and what they would change
|
| and by VERY I mean would pay good money for a reputable
| company to collect said opinions
| prakhar897 wrote:
| A long time ago, I used to read mangas on Mangarock. It was
| completely free to and seemed to have most of the mangas. So,
| what value are u adding here?
| teraflop wrote:
| It's right there in the description: "we wanted to make it as
| easy as possible to support creators by reading official
| releases."
| chompychop wrote:
| The value of legality.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| What teraflop said! But beyond that we are also releasing
| translated chapters before they hit pirate sites since we
| release them in high quality at the same time as they release
| in Japan.
| Youden wrote:
| The reason I turn to piracy isn't that I don't want to pay, it's
| that there's no legal option for the manga I want to read.
|
| Do you see a realistic path to a world where scanlations are
| unnecessary because any manga I would like to read has an
| official translation?
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| This is a complex issue. Even with Crunchyroll, we were unable
| to stop all piracy or even get all anime translated since we
| can't force people to release their work overseas or on a
| subscription service. Scanlation and piracy will continue to
| exist for monetary reasons, availability, ideological, and
| personal preferences. For example, some people don't like the
| style of some official translations in terms of either the
| wording of the translation or the visual presentation of it on
| the page and will go to piracy to get a scanlated copy the
| matches their style. Though there is a path to severely reduce
| the amount of manga that isn't officially translated for series
| that are available for overseas distribution so that it can
| garner a fanbase. That reduced reliance on scanlations is what
| we are focused on.
| ineedtosleep wrote:
| Nice. Wish you luck in this space, especially with the _other
| methods_ of reading manga around. Will definitely take a look.
|
| Question about the releases: are there any plans on having
| Japanese language versions of manga available as well?
| snvzz wrote:
| Having Japanese would make it useful to me, and to many more
| studying the language.
|
| Especially with English also available.
| echelon wrote:
| I totally agree with this.
|
| Moreover, integrating Japanese learning tools (reach out to
| Wanikani for their API?) would really elevate the product.
| I'd pay a premium right now if it could help me review kanji
| and vocabulary in a non-boring way! (eg. calculate a
| difficulty score for each manga, determine which manga have
| more vocabulary and kanji you know, etc.)
|
| Granted, I know this is a niche feature and you probably need
| hands on deck elsewhere. Maybe you'll see other demand that
| confirms this as something to build later down the road.
|
| Really awesome product though. Great execution. Wish you all
| the luck!
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > I'd pay a premium right now if it could help me review
| Kanji and vocabulary in a non-boring way! (eg. calculate a
| difficulty score for each manga, determine which manga have
| more vocabulary and kanji you know, etc.)
|
| FYI, I don't have manga yet, but a website that I'm running
| (https://jpdb.io) has exactly that for other types of media
| (anime, movies, light novels, visual novels, video games,
| etc.)
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| If you want Japanese there are tons of sites like cmoa.jp or
| Amazon Kindle Unlimited, with a huge selection. They often
| geofence their site, though.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Not at the moment, but we're definitely interested in expanding
| to other languages in the future. Japanese publishers usually
| don't license out domestic distribution rights within Japan, so
| it's a little harder to get permission to distribute the
| original Japanese versions. But that would be pretty cool!
| sonzohan wrote:
| Japanese language learner here. Would pay a subscription to
| read original Japanese versions.
| retube wrote:
| I know nothing about manga, but my kids are bang in to it. What's
| your target demographic? Are these titles child friendly? (< 12
| yo)
| simsla wrote:
| Manga is a medium and basically spans the whole gamut, similar
| to books. You'll find kid friendly adventures, adult thrillers
| and everything in between.
|
| Just checked their website, and I could see both teen and adult
| titles.
| asiachick wrote:
| Different cultures have different ideas of what "child
| friendly" means. As an example, Sailor Moon was targeted at 8yr
| old girls in Japan but deals with topics that many parents in
| the USA are not comfortable with for 8yr olds. For example
| lesbian relationships (I'm not making a judgement on that, only
| pointing out the fact that many USA parents would object to
| that topic for their 8yr olds and in fact that facet of Sailor
| Moon was edited out of the USA anime version).
|
| Another example is One Piece which is also targeted pretty
| young but nearly every female character dresses super sexy and
| one of the main characters smokes at every opportunity.
|
| Also, in general manga != for kids. There are tons of very
| adult manga and I don't just mean porn manga, I mean manga
| about adult topics targeted at adults. There are similar adult
| comics in the USA but the selection and market is arguably a
| order of magnitude or more larger (by percentage) in Japan.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| We do have some series like Chi's Sweet Home which is very
| child friendly but also fun for all ages. But our service is
| more suitable for teens and adults at the moment so you would
| need to guide your kids on Azuki so they don't read other types
| of content. We have discussed adding better filtering for age
| groups so that is something we are considering.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Aw, no Hunter x Hunter?
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Yeah, sorry about that! We'd definitely love to get it on Azuki
| but the process isn't too straight-forward and can take some
| time between negotiating with publishers and creators.
| bovermyer wrote:
| If you get it, I'd subscribe immediately. I just need to read
| volumes 33-36 to finish it out, but I don't want to buy them,
| as that seems kind of a waste... and I don't want to pirate
| them either.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I can't figure out to view raw instead of translated (I can't
| stand localization). Also searching for manga in Japanese doesn't
| work.
| Apreche wrote:
| Finally someone making this obvious product.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| When you know, you know ;)
| neotakedo wrote:
| Awesome project! I saw a similar app in France called Mangas.io!
| They are doing a great job as well, maybe you guys could work
| together?
| teg4n_ wrote:
| I'm looking forward to a decent digital option that's not Amazon
| or Amazon owned. So this is nice.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| RIP Comixology. I hope we can at least start alleviating your
| manga needs.
| bambax wrote:
| This sounds like a fantastic idea. I'm not a fan of mangas myself
| but my kids are!
|
| Any chance anything will be available in French (and/or other
| languages) at some point?
| spike021 wrote:
| Do you see yourselves as adding light novels eventually? I read a
| couple series, like _Sword Art Online: Progressive_, and usually
| need to buy each new official translation. They aren't expensive,
| but I would much prefer a subscription model where I can just pay
| to read them (and potentially reread/review a previous one to
| catch up) as they're released or all at once.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| That's definitely something we've considered, since a lot of
| manga fans also read light novels. But novels are much more
| expensive to translate than manga (way more words!), so that's
| something we'd have to figure out.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| J-novel club only has certain titles, but they are a good deal
| if you have more than a couple that you read. You can read
| recently released (60ish days?) chapters as part of the fee, if
| you buy complete books they are DRM free, and they have RSS
| feeds for each series.
|
| No SAO though; literally the only thing I want that j-novel
| club doesn't offer is Yen-On's catalog; their technical
| execution is that good.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Was excited but didn't find Vagabond. Does anyone have a
| suggestion of something they do have if Vagabond is really my
| only toe dipped in manga?
| LinAGKar wrote:
| What does W22 mean? It's not the current week. I see similar
| things on all the "hiring" posts here, W or S followed by a two
| digit number.
| Satam wrote:
| W being the winter batch of YC startup accelerator, S being the
| summer one. Thus W22 is the winter batch of 2022.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I see, thank you.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Any plans of offering other languages? I
| coincidentally the other week decided to experiment with reading
| manga in target languages I'd like to learn (or freshen up on).
| After talking to a friend I realized she actually learned French
| that way. I just ordered Akira in French, but would love to have
| a subscription to a bunch of manga in other non-English
| languages.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| For now we are focused on English language so we can give the
| translations the care and attention it needs and only expanding
| to more languages when we can do the same for them.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| Congrats on your launch! I have been an anime/manga fan for 30
| years now, been following the development of the industry for a
| long time, and I have questions/comments.
|
| 1. Are Japanese producers interested in the foreign market now?
| How does this affect you?
|
| Piracy has been a phenomenon in the foreign market for a looong
| time, and for the longest time the Japanese weren't interested in
| the foreign market at all. Even as recent as circa 2010 (by which
| time anime fan subs had been a big thing for nearly a decade),
| Japanese producers were expressing surprise upon learning about
| this phenomenon, as if they had been sleeping under a rock. Has
| this changed?
|
| I am not merely interested in this as a trivia, because it has
| practical implications. Until relatively recently -- and
| relatively late -- the anime industry lacked a legal streaming
| service with comprehensive content library. (It's still
| suboptimal: why the heck is Dragon Ball Super not available to
| Europeans on Crunchyroll!? Why can't I get Fate/Grand Order
| anywhere?! But I digress) The reason why it was so late was
| because Japanese producers weren't interested in foreign markets
| and weren't cooperative.
|
| The manga industry is in a much worse state. Are they beginning
| to change their minds now about the importance of the foreign
| market? How (dis)interested are they, how does that affect you,
| and how do you deal with that?
|
| 2. How interested is the Japanese industry in building a
| _comprehensive_ digital distribution platform?
|
| The #1 advantage that piracy manga reading sites have over legal
| sites, is breadth. I find it ridiculous that in 2022, when the
| value of digital reading should be obvious, and when the foreign
| market has shown for more than a decade that demand exists, that
| the Japanese manga industry still hasn't standardized on ways to
| let people read all their manga quickly and easily.
|
| You have little islands like Viz and Shounen Jump, but people
| don't want islands, they want continents: everything together
| instead of scattered in hundreds of places.
|
| How interested are they in the vision of a "continent"? Do they
| see the value in this? What do they think of piracy sites (other
| than that they're illegal)? Does the industry recognize that
| those sites fill a certain demand, and does the industry
| recognize that they've failed to meet demand, i.e. that the
| proliferation of piracy sites is part of their own making?
|
| 3. Do you have any plans regarding non-Japanese manga?
|
| Korean manhwa has been up and coming for years now. Titles like
| The Gamer, Noblesse, The Great Mage Returns In 4000 Years, etc.
| have attracted quite a lot of fans, and have proven that Koreans
| are capable of making high-quality, competitive works with styles
| that are either very similar to or strongly influenced by
| Japanese manga. More and more Japanese manga fans are reading
| Korean manhwa.
|
| Unlike the Japanese, which seem to be strangely conservative
| w.r.t business models and distribution media/channels, the
| Koreans are much more progressive: manhwa are typically drawn to
| be read on a digital screen and are produced to be distributed in
| digital format first. They are very open to distribute through
| more Internet channels.
|
| To a lesser extend, all of the above also applies to Chinese
| manhua. Their quality is lagging behind Korean ones, which
| impedes their adoption somewhat, but that will change in the
| future as Chinese talent develops. But the one big competitive
| advantage Chinese manhua has is the sheer production volume of
| them. On many non-legal manga reading sites, Chinese manhua has
| been dominating the front pages (which list new releases).
| Chinese manhua not only have more titles, but also release much
| more quickly. Quantity is a quality all on its own.
|
| This phenomenon (of Chinese manhua) has not escaped the eyes of
| other legal manga reading parties. INKR Comics (formerly
| MangaRock, now they are going legal) is distributing a lot of
| Chinese comics, presumably so they can easily beef up their
| library volume.
|
| In some ways, manhwa and manhua compete with manga for attention.
| And for me (and many others), they have succeeded, taking a
| significant amount of "market share" in the stuff that I read.
|
| What is your opinion about the phenomenon of manhwa and manhua?
| Do you plan to do anything with them?
| chocolatkey wrote:
| I run a competitor to Azuki, Comikey, and I'm happy to offer
| some insight into this growing industry.
|
| 1. Absolutely, Japanese publishers are interested, but maybe
| not for the reasons you think. They have realized that the
| Korean (webtoons) and Chinese (webcomics) markets are expanding
| rapidly into the international market, and webtoon services are
| crushing manga services. Even a lot of the manga audience
| itself is moving towards reading webtoons. The most scary
| example for the Japanese publishers is probably Piccoma, a
| Japan-only (for _now_ ) manga/webtoon service launched by
| Korean webtoon giant Kakao. They entered the Japanese market
| fairly recently and now are now top on the Japanese app stores,
| and offer webtoon content as well as all manga. The Japanese
| publishers have realized, perhaps a bit too late, that they
| need to spread their content quickly, and that there is a lot
| of potential in doing so. I can't speak too much about what's
| happening behind the scenes, but Japanese publishers have woken
| up and most of them are no longer sleeping under a rock.
| They're even making webtoons themselves now... But licensing is
| still very difficult for Japanese content compared to e.g.
| Chinese content, and it takes a long time for deals to go
| through. I hope that answers your question.
|
| 2. Comikey is working very hard towards that goal, as I am sure
| Azuki is too. It's been our goal since day one to become a
| replacement for aggregator sites, but that is extremely
| challenging. Some of the biggest titles are made exclusively
| available to Japanese subsidiaries of the major publishers,
| other publishers are convinced that making their own app with
| only their own content is the way to go. Our only way to
| convince them otherwise is to show them the appeal of a
| platform like ours (especially in terms of sales), but even
| then, some content is simply never going to be available to a
| company like Comikey or Azuki unless you become the size of
| e.g. Amazon. Note that the bulk of Azuki's content comes from
| Kodansha's USA subsidiary, which happily licenses its content
| to many platforms out there. They are an exception to the rule.
|
| 3. You are correct that webtoons (Korean manwha or Chinese
| manhua) were born in the digital generation, and there are huge
| advantages they have over the Japanese manga culture/industry
| and its focus on physical releases. Take for example a fun
| insider fact - many of the original files for manga are
| basically held hostage by the printing companies, and the
| printing company must be paid money in order for us to receive
| a copy of the files for localization. File organization in
| general appears to be very poor, sometimes files are simply
| "lost". Something important to realize though is that companies
| like Azuki and Comikey cannot easily license most good/popular
| webtoons. There is a huge webtoon duopoly in Korea, most
| content is held up (exclusively) by either Naver or Kakao, and
| they sublicense it to English platforms they have a stake in.
| As you mentioned, Japanese manga fans are also shifting towards
| reading webtoons, even some of our own co-founders admit to
| doing so ;). Go to an anime convention and look at a few home
| screens, you'll see the average person has webtoon apps
| installed, not manga apps.
|
| Overall, it's been intense so far, and the industry is evolving
| at a scary (for us) rate. It will be interesting to see where
| we are a few years from now. Personally, I hope manga survives
| shubb wrote:
| I've been reading a lot of Chinese novels and web comics.
| Discovering new genres based on chinese mythos, fresh takes on
| western fantasy and japanese manga tropes, and all the weird
| and wonderful new types of story has been a lot of fun.
|
| Censorship over the last few years has changed the scene a lot.
| It is now very hard to tell a political intrigue story for
| instance, and gay themes are apparently heavily censored. This
| has been really sad to see, and I can't see many of my
| favourites (even fantasy/sci-fi classic 'release that witch',
| which is quite pro-chinese but essentially about a rebellion in
| the first half) being written today.
|
| Nationalistic themes seem to be encourage, and there are
| rumours authors are told to include them so that the censors
| accept other parts of their story. These range from racist
| diatribes to chapters just showing how bad life is in america
| or japan. People say they are equivalent to every fantasy
| japanese protagonist showing their new world how great japanese
| cooking is, but it's really not the same thing at all - less
| pro, more anti. I think this will be the biggest barrier to
| popularity in the west.
|
| Tencent has a massive amount of IP in this area, and an anime
| studio, and I had expected Chinese pop culture to be exported
| in much the same way as manga finally really saturated the west
| in the late 2000s. After the changes of the last few years, I
| don't see that happening.
| toyg wrote:
| About 1, one of the factors for renewed interest in expanding
| the reach of manga is that the Japanese government started
| paying very good money for it, over the last 10 years or so:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan#Creative_Industries...
| foven wrote:
| Why should anyone use this over one of the competitors, like Viz
| or Mangaplus? This is rapidly becoming a saturated market.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Viz/Mangaplus only stream Shonen Jump titles. We are currently
| focused on the thousands of other titles that are out there
| that aren't getting that level of love. We are here to bridge
| that major gap so even more is available in English.
| foven wrote:
| That's fair, and I think it's great to find all of these
| titles that are just unnoticed in the west. However for me I
| think your UI is still falling behind these other sites
| (which do admittedly look like clones of each other) - the
| images scaling down when you mouse over the menu is honestly
| quite annoying, the front page is extremely sterile and
| basic, and it just doesn't follow the standard for the
| industry (both in the west and in japan) of typically 3 most
| recent and first 3 chapters are free. Another issue is at the
| moment you really don't have a lot of titles - 108 sure
| sounds like a lot but compared to what's out there it's
| absolutely nothing and there is no way that everyone who
| signs up will be interested in most of these. And maybe this
| is also a problem of it being very small in scale, but there
| is no option to search for more than one tag at a time which
| is the worst trend in the world and something that was solved
| on mangadex years ago. I hope you can address these things in
| future.
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback on the homepage and reader overlay
| UI. I can see what we can do about those.
|
| We are planning to add multi-select for the Genre
| filtering. Our backend supports it but haven't implemented
| the frontend portion yet.
|
| Free chapter availability are currently limited by the
| original publisher's rights and we are working on that!
|
| We're also working to add more series and have more coming
| soon. Adding each series takes time and money
| unfortunately.
| stnmtn wrote:
| I actually was just running into this problem this week, but on
| Kindle/eReaders. The solution I found was getting a out-of-state
| library card to a big city library ($50 a year) and borrowing
| books. The library also has all the manga that I wanted to read
| available to borrow with 3-4 copies of each volume, which ensures
| that I'll always be able to check out one of the ebook copies and
| put it onto my kindle
|
| I highly recommend this to anyone, not only for manga but for any
| ebooks
| yzzyx wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, what city library do you use or
| recommend? This sounds interesting but I'm just unsure how to
| go about applying for one
| olah_1 wrote:
| A little off-topic, but what is the best way to translate manga
| into other languages? I have been looking for a tool that makes
| this easy, but i haven't found anything yet.
|
| I'm talking about making new translations myself, not tools that
| will scan the page and run it through google translate.
| tendersej wrote:
| Shameless plug: my current project https://www.nekostrips.com
| aims at making the process as frictionless as possible. Still
| very rough around the edges, but useful for hobby purposes. I
| have several improvements in the works.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Awesome! I will follow the development and try it out!
|
| Any plans to open source it? Is there a roadmap? My guess is
| that you'll be adding custom font support (some unicode isn't
| support by mainstream fonts and you can probably find a niche
| by supporting minority languages). also i suppose you'll be
| adding bulk export to common comic book formats like cbz or
| cbr?
| BasouKazuma wrote:
| If you already read Japanese and are just looking for a tool to
| help with the workflow, one tool that's really promising is
| Serifu, a translation markup language being developed by
| translator Paul Starr:
| https://github.com/papatangosierra/serifu
| olah_1 wrote:
| This looks great, but how do you convert it to a comic?
|
| You need the comic author to use the format, but what tool
| does the author use? They need to define the dialogue boxes
| on the pages and somehow link those boxes to the markup
| format, right?
| dayvid wrote:
| Last time I checked (years ago haha), you would use Tesseract
| OCR and some other translation tool. There are more
| sophisticated methods now that include AI to include visual
| context for translation
| (https://syncedreview.com/2020/12/31/japanese-manga-
| translati...).
|
| Not sure what's most popular or open source now
| aidenn0 wrote:
| As far as I know, you hand the translation to someone who knows
| Photoshop, and they do the lettering.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Always good to see more official subscriptions beside
| Viz/Crunchyroll in North America.
|
| I see that you share some overlap with Crunchyroll's licenses but
| not all of them e.g. Attack on Titan but not Orange (is this a
| cost/popularity/publisher decision?). I also see that some series
| don't start at ch1 e.g. Grand Blue (I assume different publishers
| pre ch50?).
|
| It's a shame the catalog is not that big yet. Here's hoping
| future seed rounds can raise more capital for licenses.
|
| Hopefully you guys can pick up licenses for source material of
| currently airing anime too.
| rwb_1912 wrote:
| Congrats Abbas and co! Azuki looks great!
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