Manga lovers will have a new digital distribution service called K Manga from Kodansha, launching in the United States on May 10th, 2023. Users will be able to purchase and read content with an upcoming smartphone app, and the company will also launch a new website to buy range and read it via a web reader. They released a teaser website that will tide people over before everything launches.
Kodansha said the K MANGA service will offer a limited number of chapters for free, adding, “the amount of free manga that can be read per day is limited and varies from manga to manga.” The company did not mention if it will offer a way of payment to read more chapters or say if there will be a subscription aspect.
Manga will endeavour to release the latest chapters of K Manga original serialized manga and weekly and monthly magazines of Kodansha containing a collection of different manga titles simultaneously in the U.S and Japan, making the latest stories available earlier than any other competing U.S. services,” the company said.
It specified that chapters of popular manga in the U.S. currently ongoing in Japan, such as “EDENS ZERO,” “Blue Lock,” “Rent-A-Girlfriend,” “The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse,” and “Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro” will be available on K Manga before any other competing platform.
“The K Manga team is committed to continually creating content within the K Manga platform, bringing many brand-new stories to U.S. readers as they are simultaneously distributed in Japan. We hope that our audience will enjoy K Manga through encountering many never-before-seen stories, becoming a fan of those stories, and then watching how those stories become popular,” project leader Yuta Hiraoka said.
Among the Kodansha library titles, the new platform will host the comic series “The Seven Deadly Sins,” “Fire Force,” and “Chihayafuru.” It will also distribute originals such as Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, and I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
