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Answerman - Why Is K MANGA Not a Subscription Service?

In Japan, we use a system that is exactly the same as K MANGA, and we have been able to share the fruits of its success with our authors.

Based on this philosophy, we compensate authors for the purchase of their works with free points distributed within the service in the same way that we compensate authors for the purchase of their works with paid points. Even if the user does not spend any money, if he or she spends a little time and effort, we will be able to reward authors for their work.

In addition, with tickets that allow limited access for 72 hours, which can be obtained daily, it is possible to try out at least half of all the available works. We believe that in this way, by allowing readers to experience as many works as possible without having to pay for them, we can ultimately maximize the rewards to authors.

We hope you will understand K MANGA's system for supporting authors, which cannot be achieved through a subscription model.

Being an English version of Magazine Pocket (i.e. magapoke - https://pocket.shonenmagazine.com/), it's disappointing how KManga is not only an inferior implementation that has fewer offerings at a more expensive price but also fails to address the reason why Western audiences love and use contemporary services like Mangaplus or Viz's offerings: being able to read the latest chapters for series even if -- in the case of Mangaplus -- for a limited time.

Right now KManga offers 13 of Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine (WSM) series: "Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister", "When Will Ayumu Make His Move?", "Girlfriend, Girlfriend", "A Couple of Cuckoos", "The Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses", "Go! Go! Loser Ranger!", "To Your Eternity", "Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms", "Blue Lock", "Rent-a-Girlfriend", "Shangri-La Frontier", "Edens Zero", and "Four Knights of the Apocalypse". A certain amount of these chapters are available for free, but the availability discrepency between KManga and Magapoke doesn't make sense. For example, in KManga "Cafe Terrace" requires points for all of its chapters starting at Ch. 51, but on Magapoke -- at the time of this writing -- Chs. 99-101 were available for free (https://pocket.shonenmagazine.com/episode/3269632237257218878) and there's no indication that the most recent chapters (i.e. 102-104) will even be made available for free on KManga at any point like it would on Magapoke.

In addition to that, KManga is just exhorbantly more expensive than Magapoke. As I mentioned above there are 13 WSM series on KManga which means that if a user wanted to read all of them they would have to spend nearly $13 per week. But in Magapoke they offer a subscription that gives you all the series in the magazine as if they were paid with points for the cost of 840 yen (or roughly $6.24) PER MONTH! So in a month's span a user could theoretically pay more than 8x what their Japanese counterpart would pay for fewer series. Why isn't such a subscription option available in KManga? It just seems counterintuitive to not even have such an option avaiable when you have offers like Mangaplus where the first three and most recent three chapters for a series are available at no cost or Viz's various apps where the same is true but they include an additional subscription option that allows you to read a set number of chapters per month from their entire backlog (which is great for people who want to binge a series or see if they're interested in something) and doesn't require a commitment like is being done on KManga where you are effectively buying chapters piecemeal rather than buying the volumes for the series you like from other storefronts. It's just not convenient.

Thanks for getting that info, annoying as it is to see. I can understand that they might need to censor for app stores, but if they just put the same version on the web to save the trouble/cost of having to have two different versions, then they've lost me there. I prefer reading on a big screen over a phone or tablet, but I'm not going to pay for a worse version than could be found elsewhere. I'll still pick up the physical books for series I want to collect, but the buck stops there.

However, generally the ebooks you pay for (on various platforms, like Bookwalker etc) are not censored, so there is incentive to pay for the series you're interested in rather than relying on what are basically intended as free previews.