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So they have a "subscription service" but it's only so you're guaranteed some of their paltry coins each month to read a few chapters. Biggest monkey paw curl they could pull.

This whole service is hopeless.

ZeetherKID77 wrote:

So they have a "subscription service" but it's only so you're guaranteed some of their paltry coins each month to read a few chapters. Biggest monkey paw curl they could pull.

This whole service is hopeless.

Actually, just checked, and you're right. The 'subscription' here seems to simply pay for a certain amount of points(coins) + few extra points(coins). From their ToS;

Quote:

Point Subscription Service.
Users may use the Point Subscription Service (which is implemented on the Website only) by paying the prescribed membership fee. In the Point Subscription Service, by paying a certain monthly membership fee, the user may receive a certain number of the Free Points as a reward in addition to the Paid Points corresponding to such fee.

Whereas mangapocket, the Japanese version of the platform K Manga is based on gives access to a whole magazine worth of reading for the price of sub(840yen/month(~$6/month). As poster sprinterstar7 here so eloquently elaborates(below is just a snippet of the post);

sprinterstar7 wrote:

Also, KManga is significantly more expensive than its Japanese counterpart for how little you get. Some things I mentioned to them a few weeks ago:

Quote:

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.

So we're just supposed to bow our heads and pay more for an inferior service? Just how gullible do they think Western readers(just US readers to be exact, for now) are if they expect this to fly?...

So they have essentially a proper subscription service in Japan that they aren't giving us because...they think the points system benefits authors. Despite the fact that they have an actual subscription in Japan.

This company is as dumb as a pile of bricks.

Blanchimont wrote:

Whereas mangapocket, the Japanese version of the platform K Manga is based on gives access to a whole magazine worth of reading for the price of sub(840yen/month(~$6/month).

MagaPoke does offer the same “subscribe to points” schemes (I know because I accidentally subscribed for a while when I meant to buy some one-off points). You can also subscribe specifically to Weekly Shounen Magazine but it’s important to realise you only get the current chapters; it’s not like Shounen Jump where you pay a fiver a month and can read the whole back catalogue, if you wanted to read an ongoing series from the start you’d still need to buy the older chapters with points (or get the volumes) then read new chapters with the sub as they come out. Depending on how many series in the magazine you’re actually reading, buying the individual chapters as they come out could be cheaper.