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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
