> Manga magazines Missed a great opportunity for marketing wordplay: Mangazine Congrats on your launch!
Antarctic Press would probably have significant objections to that.
Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#132I'm glad to see this service making it off the ground. With the rising popularity of manga globally there's a lot of room for innovation in this space, especially transcending the sometimes myopic focus of more traditional publishers on those "safe" titles which might be perceived to sell well (an attitude which both keeps excellent manga away from the Western market and foments the scanlation scene, for better or wo…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#133What's your policy on same account with multiple users (like Netflix)? Usually I split those things with friends so services like this can become quite affordable in our currency (BRL).
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 :)
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#134Always 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…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#135This is awesome and I am getting two accounts - one for me and another for my daughter. Can you please add a "completed" tag so that I can binge read ?
It's on the feature roadmap!
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#136Great product, definitely going to try it out for a month or so. It would be nice if you guys provided a Tachiyomi plugin; most of what I read is in Tachiyomi so it'd be inconvenient to switch between two apps.
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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#137I'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 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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#138Did you have to set up deals with each of the publishers individually to publish their manga in your app? How did those conversations go?
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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#139How are new titles chosen / added to the library? Can premium users request for titles? When will you allow searching titles by author?
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.
Re: Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
#140Hey, 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.