Azuki gives manga fans new digital reading options

Manga has been the fastest growing category in the US comic book market for the past dozen years, outpacing the growth of everything except graphic novels for young readers. Although there are more manga available to English-speaking readers than ever before, the amount arriving on these shores is only a fraction of the total produced by Japanese publishers.

Readers whose appetite for content exceeds the selection offered by publishers such as Viz and Kodansha on legitimate apps know they can find what they're looking for online, but only on legally questionable pirate sites . This leaves room for new ventures offering ethical fans legal access to previously unreleased and original material through licensing agreements with smaller Japanese publishers, as long as the prices are affordable and the selection is appealing. p>

Azuki is one of many recent entrants to the market. Co-founded by five young industry veterans (Adela Chang, Abbas Jaffery, Evan Minto, Krystyn Neisess and Ken Urata) in 2019, the virtual company launched its app during the pandemic and has seen steady growth, a capital injection of Y-Combinator, and a growing assortment of new titles. It has grown into an extended team of several dozen and still operates virtually rather than from a desktop.

Abbas Jaffery, co-founder and CEO of Azuki

Courtesy of Azuki

"We had all worked on [Sony-owned anime platform] Crunchyroll and kept in touch," said co-founder and CEO Abbas Jaffery. "We asked ourselves what we would like to see in a manga app, as we all saw similar issues in existing designs, and invested a lot of effort into creating the app."

At launch, the subscription service included manga series from Kodansha International and Kaiten Books, and quickly expanded to include more publishers as well as exclusive titles directly licensed and localized by Azuki. Today, Azuki offers over 200 series, including The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting, BLITZ, Gacha Girls Corps, Attack on Titan, Fire Force, and other publishers like Futabasha, Micro Magazine, ABLAZE and Star Fruit Books. According to the company, the site has hosted more than one million unique active users since its launch and has served more than 30 million pages of content.

While the Azuki app is subscription-based, the company has just announced a program to distribute downloadable ebooks of its original and licensed content to BookWalker, Amazon AMZN, Apple Books, and Google Play Books, in beginning with Dear Detective: Mitsuko's Files and Reversing the Tables on the Seatmate Killer!. The first volume of each series will be available for pre-order on BookWalker, and they will go on sale March 23. Pre-orders for the other platforms will go live in the coming days, according to the company.

Evan Minto, Azuki Co-Founder and Director of Marketing and Licensing< /p> Courtesy of Azuki

"We want to give people a wide range of manga to read and a wide range of ways to read it," said Evan Minto, Director of Marketing and Licensing . “We do our own research for titles that subscribers will like. This curatorial approach gives us the mindset of a publisher, not just an app."

Azuki has a narrow path to navigating the digital comics space, which is dominated by Amazon's comiXology service (which offers manga alongside other types of comics), platforms dedicated manga platforms like Shonen Jump and Viz, and Korean platforms