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Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

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Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#141

Post by BasouKazuma »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #109
BasouKazuma wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> The big publishers are very conservative, and no one wants to be the licensing person who gave away the farm to a foreign startup. 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?

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.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#142

Post by BasouKazuma »

rizzaxc wrote: post #113

interested in how your licensing works across the globe. how do I know which titles I have access to from an arbitrary country?

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.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#144

Post by BasouKazuma »

CJefferson wrote: post #120
BasouKazuma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is, to me, a vital feature. 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).

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.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#145

Post by belated_tech »

On a related topic, as a Japanese learner, I would really like to see a Japanese-text version manga subscription service available for people outside Japan, but I doubt if it will ever happen due to licensing reasons. Likewise, CrunchyRoll hasn’t been able to provide native Japanese subtitles.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#146

Post by thot_experiment »

Looks like they're using a pretty interesting DRM scheme involving somehow scrambling the images on the wire and then decoding them in a service worker? Props for an "innovation" I hadn't seen before.

I'll be investigating ways to defend against this further, for now fortunately thanks to the open nature of the web we can write a script that listens on load, paints the final image onto a canvas, turns the canvas into a data-uri and then saves the resultant unencumbered image to your hard drive as you're scrolling through the manga.

Essentially the code in this SO question is all you need.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10673122/how-to-save-can...

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#147

Post by BasouKazuma »

dagi3d wrote: post #130
BasouKazuma wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am curious how this pricing model affect the publishers/creators. I understand that from the consumer point of view, it looks quite appealing but wonder if for the players in the other side it would be the same. Is the idea that in the long term there will be a bigger user base paying for this new model which translates into a higher revenue stream than the actual one even if they end paying way less compared to bu…

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.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#148

Post by jonahjoshua »

BasouKazuma wrote: post #140
jonahjoshua wrote: post #127

Hey, congrats on the launch! My feedback: Please pre-load all the chapter images (or at least a few in advanced) while starting to read a chapter. Having to wait on the next page while reading is a bit cumbersome.

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.

Thanks for replying! I'm using the iOS app.

Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

#149

Post by Daiz »

BasouKazuma wrote: post #137
Daiz wrote: post #118

I've done a couple impressions threads since your initial launch last year[1][2], and it's nice to see that there's been some improvements in regards to matters brought up in them, though there's definitely still room for more. The reader in particular is still rather janky and lacking in options (I would really like to see more fitting options than just forced fit to height as well as manual control over image quali…

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…

I did see the beta calendar. It's a start for sure, but most back catalog titles still have zero information in terms of when to expect new chapters for them, so there is definitely still work to be done in that regard. And on the calendar itself: entries should ideally be grouped by day. Multiple entries for the same title on the same day should get grouped to one entry (so eg. "Again!! c74-76" rather than "Again!! c74" "Again!! c75" "Again!! c76"). And this one's especially important: if a user is logged in, the calendar should highlight titles in My List by default, and you should also be able to filter the calendar to only show My List titles. For an external reference, I can recommend taking a look at J-Novel Club's release calendar, as it covers basically all of these points and then some: https://j-novel.club/calendar

On the subject of apps, I'm not saying you shouldn't have apps, I'm just saying that there are certain things you should share across the web and apps, like the reader. Basically, you could have the reader running in a web view inside the mobile apps, and this way you could have just one reader codebase that gets reused across all the platforms. You could take this even further and build your mobile apps with web tech inside web views as well. You probably wouldn't do that at this point, but I would still recommend looking into using the reader in a web view at least, as that's no doubt the most complex frontend component in the entire system.

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