BasouKazuma

You got it right! Since each user is paying less per chapter read, you need more subscribers on the service to surpass the revenue that would have been received with a-la-carte only. And there is a huge opportunity to get more subscribers paying to read than there are people paying under the traditional a-la-carte structure due to the much lower barrier to entry. This is exactly how Crunchyroll pushed the anime industry forward where physical sales are mostly downstream from digital subscription services.

We've kept age filtering in mind even before we launched but haven't been able to prioritize it yet even though we agree and want to support it. But we hadn't thought of allowing a guardian to select the things a kid can read which is a wonderful idea! We'll keep that one in mind when we get around to age and content filtering.

Thanks for the report! We'll get that fixed up.

For all the titles we have right now, they are available worldwide except within Japan itself so you don't need to worry about restrictions. We plan to keep it that way but are uncertain if Japanese publishers will start restricting this more in the future by dividing up the rights.

Some of it is fear of cannibalizing the traditional print and ebook business, uncertainty of newer strategies, and desire to retain control of their properties.

Which platform are you using? It should already be preloading a few images in advance but maybe we can do a better job on this on a particular platform.

We choose new titles by talking with our publishers to figure out what they have English streaming rights to and what we think fits well in our catalog.

Premium users can send us a message on social media or via our support portal to request series, but we’re considering adding a more dedicated way to send requests.

Searching by author is on the roadmap! We have the metadata so it’s just a matter of integrating that into search.

Yep, we've got deals with six English-language publishers. The conversations have generally been pretty smooth. Most of the publishers we work with are excited to get their series in front of a larger audience through a streaming service.

Thanks for the constant feedback, Daiz, brutally honest as it always is ;)

We're tracking all of the reader issues and feature requests like the ones you mentioned, but of course with a small team handling everything from development to licensing (our five founders are the only employees) we have to be really careful about what we prioritize.

As for image quality, we'll look into the specific issues you mentioned to see if they're present in the source files we get from Kodansha or not.

Re: Kaiten exclusivity, what we can say publicly right now is that our partnership goes deeper than just exclusives, and we're working on some projects that we'll hopefully be able to talk about soon. One visible thing it has helped us do is collaborate with Kaiten on cross-promotions for their titles without worrying that our efforts will push people to competitor services.

In terms of the calendar feature, we put out a release calendar a little while ago! https://www.azuki.co/release-calendar If you have more features you'd like to see from it, just let us know.

Azuki was always intended to be cross-platform. We believed really strongly that web had to be there because it's so accessible via links and search engines. But a lot of manga fans also look for places to read in the app stores, and we have competitors in those stores, so it was important to be able to compete there as well. You're right that cross-platform development is a challenge, but we get a significant share of our readership from Android and iOS, so we think it was the right call. We will continue to improve all platforms and everyone is free to decide when is the right time for them to use Azuki based on the features and content we have available.

This is a really cool idea, thanks for suggesting it! We’ll look into what it takes to build a Tachiyomi plugin and if it can support the terms of our publisher contracts.

It's on the feature roadmap!

Both Crunchyroll and Azuki have Attack on Titan from Kodansha, but Orange is part of a different deal CR has. Sorry about the missing chapters on Grand Blue and some other series! That’s a licensing restriction on Kodansha’s end that we’re doing everything we can to change.

No restrictions on account sharing, and adding profiles a la Netflix is something we can consider down the line. We’re happy to have more people using Azuki and talking about it with their friends :)

Thanks! We’re also really proud of our partnership with smaller publishers like Kaiten Books, Star Fruit Books, and Glacier Bay Books. It’s been great sharing their titles with more fans.

The simulpub model is definitely expensive to run at scale, especially if the localization staff is paid fairly, which is something we believe in very strongly. We’re currently experimenting with some other models as well, including serializing completed series one chapter at a time. There’s a balancing act between quality and speed obviously, and one nice thing about releasing digitally on a streaming service is that we can more easily experiment to find the right balance compared to a print publisher.

All titles on our service are available worldwide outside of Japan and we support payments worldwide by Credit Card on the website and Apple/Google on our mobile apps.

You may like "Blame!" (pronounced BLAM). It's not a similar story at all as it's more hard sci-fi action but may be up your alley. Let me know if you end up liking it.

https://www.azuki.co/series/blame

That's exactly why I started Azuki! I just want to read as easily as I can watch anime without blind buying a bunch of stuff.

Thank you!

Unfortunately publishers are not providing the the rights for content to be released in Japan through foreign services like Azuki. If we can make it work, we will.

I'm openingly against Crunchyroll's low pay for translators and have posted publicly to that extent so I completely understand that.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll take a look into the scroll issue and see if we can add an option to reverse the reading mode to left-to-right.

Thanks for the suggestion. We’ll look into them and maybe we can figure something out.

We had some cleanup to do with our custom reader to support this but we cleared that hurdle and have full screen support on our roadmap!

Whoa this is a great idea! One of our founders, Evan, is studying with WaniKani right now and he would love that. Thanks!

A lot of what chocolatkey said is accurate. Also hi chocolatkey! I really hope manga survives too and I’m happy to see folks like Comikey out there alongside us trying to push the industry forward.

1. Publishers are definitely interested in the foreign market. The issue is that many of them are very conservative about making lots of content available via subscription. They’re used to a traditional a-la-carte model for print and ebooks, and it’s taken years of advocacy from overseas publishers and services to start to convince them that there’s an untapped market that subscriptions can tap into.

2. That leads to the issue of, as you said, comprehensive platforms. chocolatkey is right that getting this is very challenging, for the reasons above. The big publishers are very conservative, and no one wants to be the licensing person who gave away the farm to a foreign startup. That said, we’ve had success with smaller publishers who are more nimble and willing to experiment. We plan to use these partnerships to prove out the model and level up to larger publishers.

3. Non-Japanese comics are on our radar for sure, but like chocolatkey said, that market is very concentrated at the moment so it would be challenging to compete with the big players head-on. Manhwa and webtoons are huge right now, but anime and manga have withstood decades of potential competitors and continue to grow. Fans still want to read Japanese comics and experience the unique stories and perspectives they offer, even if they’re part of a diet of other types of comics.

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.

RIP Comixology. I hope we can at least start alleviating your manga needs.

Currently we are a middleman service for other publishers but we are looking into in-house translation.

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.

I'm a Berserk fan myself and got the brand tattooed on my neck so getting that would be awesome!