Year of all records for manga in France, 2021 ends with the great success of volume 100 of
One Piece,
sold more than 130,000 copies in three days.
If the public is present in bookstores, millions of readers remain fond of pirate versions unearthed on the internet.
It is on the basis of this observation that the start-up Mangas.io launched a subscription offer to Netflix, allowing you to read manga in digital version at will for € 6.90 per month.
Since the opening of the beta version in May 2020, the platform has won over a growing number of publishers, including Ki-oon.
The upcoming arrival of the juggernaut Kana, which has just been announced on Saturday during the Pop Asia Matsuri festival, could have a snowball effect.
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From January 27, 2022, several major titles from the Kana catalog will gradually join Mangas.io, starting with
Assassination Classroom,
Bakuman
and
Samurai 8,
followed by
Gintama, Kowloon Generic Romance, Corps Solitaires, Mission: Yozakura Family
and
Undead Unluck
. In all, around forty titles are concerned, bringing the total number of works offered on the platform to around 150. In addition, from the end of February, four original Kana creations will complete the offer
(Sweet Konkrete, Oneira, Talento 7
and
Vanupied).
I absolutely wanted to arrive on the platform with volume, and not series by series.
This experience will only have meaning if Mangas.io's offer is very visible and substantial.
Christel Hoolans, Managing Director of Kana Publishing
"This is what I had always dreamed of doing ... but we did not have the internal skills to develop such a platform at the time",
explains Christel Hoolans, general manager of Kana editions, who was immediately seduced by the Mangas.io concept.
However, there is no question of rushing:
“I first wanted to convince the Japanese publisher Shueisha, which represents a large part of our catalog.
I absolutely wanted to arrive on the platform with volume, and not series by series.
This experience will only be meaningful if Mangas.io's offer is very visible and consistent. ”
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"The arrival of flagship titles from Kana will give Mangas.io credibility",
believes Romain Régnier, its founder and CEO. According to him, the strong point of his platform is
"to offer a manga experience and not a" marketplace "where you will consume a chapter or a tome".
Concretely, the idea is to bring the catalog to life by sparking the publication of chapters to create regular meetings with the community, invited to discuss on Discord, traditional social networks and via an internal feedback system.
"
Old Boy
was a little known title and having serialized it generated a loyalty that didn't exist,"
said Yun J. Inada, COO.
And it is still in our reading charts! ”
In addition to the permanent series that today make up the Mangas.io catalog,
“ephemeral releases”
will be available for a limited number of months before disappearing and then coming back, with a transparent calendar so as not to frustrate readers.
“This can create attention to certain titles which, otherwise, might have gone by the wayside,”
believes Romain Régnier, who wishes to arouse the curiosity of his community.
Some 20,000 people have already tried the adventure.
70% of the generated net income donated to publishers
What about the economic model?
“In 99% of cases, it's
revenue sharing.
This works with an account system provisioned by all the subscriptions which will feed our turnover, and which will then be distributed in proportion to the readings on the platform with all the publishers ”,
summarizes the CEO.
70% of the net income generated is thus donated to publishers, who have reading statistics for their manga.
A B2B tool will soon be offered to them so that they can analyze tops and flops, with the option of eventually publishing content themselves.
“Netflix and Spotify are tech players.
Today, the market - and this is the position we are trying to take - lack the expertise of a tech player who understands what users expect, ”
adds Yun J. Inada.
“
Kowloon Generic Romance,
and more generally the work of Jun Mayuzuki, is a song we fell in love with.
She takes us into stories that are both curious and luminous, always intriguing ”,
confides Christel Hoolans.
Kana
Until now in France, the digital manga offer has been synonymous with the purchase of individual volumes. This model has never aroused enthusiasm. "
If we sell 5 to 6 digital copies of Old Boy per month, that's already great",
smiles Christophe Geldron, director of publication at naBan. A figure to be compared to the 10,000 paper sales of this manga. The work, which inspired the famous film by Park Chan-wook, on the other hand works very of course Mangas.io, which brings in its publisher a good additional income.
Digital only represents 2% of total comic book turnover in France, compared to around 10% in the United States ... and more than 50% in Japan!
"The turnover of digital has exploded among the Japanese since they began to sell titles that they no longer published or which had been living for 10-20 twenty years",
decrypts Christophe Geldron.
He regrets that France
"does not manage to mourn the catalog funds",
which would find a second youth on a platform like Mangas.io and would then reach a new audience.
For the boss of naBan, refusing to make the old manga classics available as a subscription would be like saying that
"
Jurassic Park
and
Psychosis
should not be on Netflix but at 20 euros on DVD or Blu-ray because are major titles that always sell ”.
Home of the Glénat Manga Max platform, which offers the last chapter of
One Piece
simultaneously and the first chapter of 176 other manga.
Glénat
Mangas.io has yet to convince many publishers to join it, starting with the market leader, Glénat.
"We want to find the best way to offer the works in digital, in one way or another, without harming the author or the titles,
cautiously answers Satoko Inaba, the manga editorial director of the group.
It is not a question of selling off works. "
However, she does not rule out joining Mangas.io one day and recognizes that
"the subscription scheme can be interesting to give visibility and highlight lesser known titles".
At Glénat as elsewhere, digital unit sales remain
"very limited"
but
"They're starting to gain weight, especially on big titles like
One Piece
and
Dragon Ball
."
For the moment, Glénat has opted for a different strategy. In the wake of the Japanese Shueisha, who launched his own free platform, Manga Plus, some major titles of which are now available in French since September, the French leader has unsheathed Glénat Manga Max. This platform also offers the last chapters of its
One Piece
phenomenon series free of charge
, simultaneously with Japan, as well as the first chapter of 176 works in its catalog.
"We wanted to create a place to reach out to people who don't necessarily go to bookstores, who don't necessarily read paper books,"
explains Satoko Inaba. An educational effort that has so far affected some 15,000 otakus.
“French readers really like paper and we don't want to fight against it,”
concludes Romain Régnier of Mangas.io
.
We rather want to help the development of digital offers to support physical reading which is more oriented towards the collection, while digital is more oriented towards discovery. ”
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