TOKYO -- Kadokawa is launching a service that the Japanese publishing house hopes will become a pillar of its digital business -- ComicWalker, a free, online, worldwide manga comic distribution service available in Japanese, Chinese and English.
The service will start on March 22 by offering 200 titles of manga totaling 5,000 pages. It will be accessible on smartphones, tablets as well as personal computers. The Japanese lines can be switched to English or Chinese with a single command. The latest chapters will be available for free until the next chapter is published. After that, the older chapters will be available for purchase.
Kadokawa -- created last October through the reorganization of Kadokawa Group Holdings and its consolidation with nine subsidiaries -- plans to provide through the new service manga from up to 23 of the group's printed and web-based magazines. The publisher aims to have ComicWalker by the end of this year become one of Japan's biggest comic sites, with 1 million monthly-based users and 100 million page views.
Free, if you can wait
"These days, we don't see many people reading manga magazines on the train. Unless we do something, Japan's manga culture will decline," Senior Managing Director Shinichiro Inoue said.
The company says that ComicWalker will achieve two major goals if successful -- it will expose more young readers, who are more tech-savvy, to Kadokawa's manga library, and help export a comic culture particular to Japan to the rest of the world.
Of the 200 initial works, about 150 have been chosen from serialized manga comics printed in magazines. They are to be available on ComicWalker for two weeks after their print versions come out. This means that though users will have to wait two weeks for new stories, they will be able to continue reading a whole series for free.
The catch is that once a new chapter is available online, the older chapter gets archived at Kadokawa's online bookstore, Book Walker, where readers will have to pay for it. With this, Kadokawa hopes to broaden the scope of regular buyers of its comic books. The company also plans to offer about 50 manga works that are available only on ComicWalker.
Initially, 40 titles will be available in English and Chinese in addition to the original Japanese. "We want to provide French versions as well before very long," a Kadokawa executive said. "French-speaking countries include African nations where networks of bookshops remain underdeveloped. We would like people in Africa to also read Japanese manga."
Beating the pirates
Kadokawa's move to offer its latest comics simultaneously around the world is partly designed to help fight the rampant illegal distribution of manga. For instance, comics in the highly popular "Weekly Shonen Jump" magazine, published by Kadokawa's Japanese rival Shueisha, which goes on sale every Monday, are available illegally online, in English, the Wednesday before it hits shelves. This is achieved presumably by people who obtain the latest issue somehow and manage to get it translated into English using a worldwide network of thousands of translators.
Three major underground sites alone have a total of 9 million monthly unique users, with page views amounting to 2 billion. These sites make about $12 million a year from ads, eating into the revenues of the original publishers.
Kadokawa decided to go ahead with ComicWalker after the successful simultaneous global release of the printed and digital versions of latest installment of "Neon Genesis Evangelion."　Volume 13 was released in November 2012 in 15 countries, including in Europe, the U.S., China and Brazil, and was a big hit in all locations.
"That experience convinced us that if we deliver legitimate manga digitally and quickly, we'll be able to win the hearts of comic fans worldwide, and as a result, eradicate underground sites," Inoue said.
DeNA, an operator of social games, started in December a similar free online comic service in multiple languages, called Manga Box. The service has only 38 titles on offer so far, but it already has 3 million downloads. This success is being attributed to the lineup of popular manga from magazines of leading Japanese publishers, including Kodansha and Shogakukan.
