Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
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!
149 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadWhile 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.
and by VERY I mean would pay good money for a reputable company to collect said opinions
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.
However, I do appreciate your attention towards being kind and supportive to people!
If you identify a pain point and keep it to yourself, you’re doing a disservice to the founders. If they charge too much and no one ever tells them, the business will fail and they won’t learn why. Honest (polite) feedback is more beneficial than trying to spare their feelings.
> I can only imagine the amount of work this team puts into crafting these translation
This team is for now a middleman, they haven’t put any work into the translations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807307
Question about the releases: are there any plans on having Japanese language versions of manga available as well?
Especially with English also available.
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!
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.)
Though I understand it is common practice for Japanese publisher to have region lock on Japanese version and ban international buyer to buy without obvious reason. Looking forward to see what you could do on this space. Wish you luck.
Just checked their website, and I could see both teen and adult titles.
My niece loves manga, and I would buy her a subscription, but there would have to be some kind of age filtering. What I would personally love would be the ability to select exactly which series she can read, as sometimes simple age restrictions aren't good (some teen series are fine, others really aren't).
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.
I highly recommend this to anyone, not only for manga but for any ebooks
The story is still fantastic and interesting, but not anywhere near an ending. Gon meeting Ging is as close to it as you’ll get. From there it ramps up again in full force with a huge new set of characters and the idea of a new world to explore.
Togashi has said he’d either finish Hunter × Hunter or die. Given the pace of release[1] and the state of the story, don’t bet on a conclusion.
Those extra chapters are still worth it, but be prepared for it to stop abruptly.
[1]: https://hiatus-hiatus.github.io/
I’m talking about making new translations myself, not tools that will scan the page and run it through google translate.
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?
Not sure what’s most popular or open source now
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?
As for your questions:
- No plans to open source it, unless I stop working on it.
As for the roadmap, it is extensive. In random order (both in terms of importance and release horizon) I am planning:
- exports as archives (if I remember properly, .cbr and .cbz formats are just renamed .rar and .zip respectively) as you mentioned
- proper font selection/customization (and eventually, bring your own) as you surmised
- workflow improvements (shortcuts, bulk commands vs current clicking item by item)
- specifying bubble type, from visual type (text in closed bubble opaque or not, text over background) to purpose (speech, onomatopeia, in-world written text, meta explanation) and source (who is talking, to whom, etc)
- moving the current "zoom" level from chapter to series: link to Knowledge Base, for easier lexical reference (with regards to man(ga|hwa|hua) names are often transcriptions of foreign words / names which are often translated back with varying degrees of success).
- multiplayer
- making the app not just usable but ergonomic on mobile screens
- a lot more.
I will add a roadmap section on the app.
Origin story:
I worked as a translator (handwritten medical forms, business communications) during my studies and got interested in what was considered the state of the art for CAT tools. I ended up building my own out of scripts, macros and rule-based processing because nothing provided the ease, flexibility and low overhead I was looking for.
With nekostrips, I am convinced I can deliver a compelling tool for comics.
If you or anyone else feels like discussing further, you can contact me through the form on the app, or on social networks.
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.
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.
Noted on the default reader mode. Would you prefer it default to Vertical scrolling mode?
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.
Any chance anything will be available in French (and/or other languages) at some point?
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.
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 li...
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.
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
Why? What's the downside of licensing content to smaller publishers? Licensing doesn't cost the producers anything right?
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.
What is the risk to them? Don't they get paid no matter who they license to? Or is this about fear of cannibalizing the print business?
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!
https://www.azuki.co/series/blame
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?