Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
I&#x27;ve done a couple impressions threads since your initial launch last year[1][2], and it&#x27;s nice to see that there&#x27;s been some improvements in regards to matters brought up in them, though there&#x27;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 quality) and the controls aren&#x27;t great either - for example, trying to rapidly click forward with mouse works poorly because the click regions are image dependent rather than constant so the animated page transitions makes clicking in the same area unreliable. And speaking of transitions, it would be nice to have control over the speed of them, including making them instant. The current speed is slower than I&#x27;d like and it&#x27;s a constant source of annoyance.<p>And while you&#x27;ve increased the image resolution since launch, there are still notable problems with the overall image quality. Some series have horrible looking screentones (like Domestic Girlfriend as a random example I just found) while others have incorrect black levels (black isn&#x27;t RGB 0,0,0 but instead something like ~36,31,33)- The World of Summoning being one recent example. I know that in some cases you might have screentone issues at source level but manga is something where you have to really know what you&#x27;re doing in terms of image scaling to not mess things up further, as screentones are incredibly fragile and easily turn into an ugly mess when resized.<p>One thing that I&#x27;m decidedly not happy with that you&#x27;ve done after launch is the exclusive streaming deal you made with Kaiten Books a while back. The manga distribution market has generally been one of the few bright spots in the area of Japanese media where things are not exclusive by default and customers can actually have real choice and preference in terms of where they get their manga from. In other words, competition that&#x27;s actually beneficial for consumers, the same which can&#x27;t be said for eg. anime streaming services where the only difference is in which service has what shows, which does not benefit the consumer in any way. I would be more understanding of exclusivity if Azuki actually did in-house licensing and translation, but signing exclusive distribution deals with a third-party publisher just comes off as trying to pull up the ladder after yourself to the benefit of no-one but yourself. This is a sincere plea from me: please keep any possible future exclusives to in-house licenses at most, please. The world does not need any more anti-consumer exclusivity than what it already has.<p>Seriously, it&#x27;s not a problem especially for manga subscription services to share the same content. If there&#x27;s multiple places to read the same things, then I can choose the one that offers the best service, and while Azuki has issues, I do think you have potential too. The only real problem with shared content isn&#x27;t the sharing itself but rather Kodansha, the publisher that shares its content the most, and their goals in sharing, which seems to be to primarily selling ebooks rather than letting consumers actually read their series in full via subscription services. That&#x27;s really the primary problem for the subscription services to tackle - actually having series to read in full. This is why I also see the calendar features I talk about in the Twitter threads as so important - if a back catalog series isn&#x27;t fully available, then it&#x27;s really important to be able to see when I could expect it to be, because I sure don&#x27;t want to be stuck as a subscriber for months only to see new content for a series I like come out once in a blue moon, if ever.<p>Going back to more technical matters - I do have to wonder, what made you decide as a small team that you&#x27;ll build entirely separate versions on three platforms? Having built a web-based manga reader professionally myself, I know that it&#x27;s not an easy task to develop an actually good one, and you&#x27;ve essentially made that three times harder with separate codebases for every platform. At the very least, I would recommend only focusing on the web tech reader and reusing that across the platforms, as right now the burden of 3x development is really showing with how a web can get a feature and then we&#x27;ll have to wait months and months for one of the mobile apps to get them and then even longer for the other to get it too.<p>Anyway, that&#x27;s all that I can bother to write for now. I do intend to make another Twitter thread on the service at one point - maybe in three months at the one-year mark?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Daiz42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1409670066925228035" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Daiz42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1409670066925228035</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Daiz42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1428413172516544512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Daiz42&#x2F;status&#x2F;1428413172516544512</a>