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K Manga Service Expands to More Countries

The official X (formerly Twitter) account of Kodansha's K Manga service announced on Tuesday that it is now available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K.

The service recently expanded to the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Mexico, and Brazil in February. It previously expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore in October.

Kodansha Ltd. launched its manga distribution service K Manga for Android, iOS and browsers exclusively in the U.S. in May 2023. It launched the app with approximately 400 titles including 60 simulpub titles, with their chapters debuting on K Manga before on other platforms. The first few chapters of most titles are available for free.

Kodansha USA Publishing ended distribution of simulpub chapters of its manga titles on KiraKira Media Inc.'s digital manga service Azuki in January 2023. The company removed previous simulpub chapters from Azuki in January 2022. Early non-simulpub chapters of some of the series removed, as well as several of Kodansha's non-simulpub series remain unaffected on the platform.

The company then removed a number of its manga titles from Crunchyroll in January 2023. Kodansha had issued a statement to Crunchyroll, saying that its suspension of simulub updates was due to "changes" in its simulpub distribution program.

Source: K MANGA's X/Twitter account