Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription
Congrats on your launch! I have been an anime&#x2F;manga fan for 30 years now, been following the development of the industry for a long time, and I have questions&#x2F;comments.<p>1. Are Japanese producers interested in the foreign market now? How does this affect you?<p>Piracy has been a phenomenon in the foreign market for a looong time, and for the longest time the Japanese weren&#x27;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?<p>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&#x27;s still suboptimal: why the heck is Dragon Ball Super not available to Europeans on Crunchyroll!? Why can&#x27;t I get Fate&#x2F;Grand Order anywhere?! But I digress) The reason why it was so late was because Japanese producers weren&#x27;t interested in foreign markets and weren&#x27;t cooperative.<p>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?<p>2. How interested is the Japanese industry in building a <i>comprehensive</i> digital distribution platform?<p>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&#x27;t standardized on ways to let people read all their manga quickly and easily.<p>You have little islands like Viz and Shounen Jump, but people don&#x27;t want islands, they want continents: everything together instead of scattered in hundreds of places.<p>How interested are they in the vision of a &quot;continent&quot;? Do they see the value in this? What do they think of piracy sites (other than that they&#x27;re illegal)? Does the industry recognize that those sites fill a certain demand, and does the industry recognize that they&#x27;ve failed to meet demand, i.e. that the proliferation of piracy sites is part of their own making?<p>3. Do you have any plans regarding non-Japanese manga?<p>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.<p>Unlike the Japanese, which seem to be strangely conservative w.r.t business models and distribution media&#x2F;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.<p>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.<p>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 library volume.<p>In some ways, manhwa and manhua compete with manga for attention. And for me (and many others), they have succeeded, taking a significant amount of &quot;market share&quot; in the stuff that I read.<p>What is your opinion about the phenomenon of manhwa and manhua? Do you plan to do anything with them?