The first mobile manga subscription service, Mangamo, launches today, offering readers unlimited access to the largest legally licensed library of English-language titles available, from publishers like Kodansha, Toppan and North Star Pictures.
Manga readers around the world can now download Mangamo on iOS for iPhone and iPad and sign up for a two-month free trial of the service, which is only available for a limited time. For a $4.99 USD fee per month, subscribers gain access to the entire catalog, without interruption from ads and with no additional purchases necessary. At launch, this catalog includes Hajime Isayama's hugely popular Attack On Titan and Atsushi Ōkubo's Fire Force, which received a successful anime adaption last summer, as well as the newly-adapted Somali and the Forest Spirit and Arte. Titles are updated daily with new chapters with an extra 300 titles and over 1,000 volumes set to be added over the next three months, including some new English-language releases like Dropkick My Devil, Akatsuki Babies, Reset Game and Daily Meteor Strike.
The service is being helmed by industry leaders from Hulu, Crunchyroll, Netflix and Viz Media with the intention of providing manga fans an easily accessible and professionally localized and curated reading platform. In doing this, Mangamo aims to deter consumers away from piracy sites that have been a costly drain on the industry for quite some time. In 2018, Japan Times reported that manga piracy was estimated to have lost the domestic market ¥50 billion, and ¥1.3 trillion in the U.S. Recent years have seen a renewed and concerted push to shut down apps, such as Manga Rock, that have been uploading illegally obtained content.
Rather than flocking to "scanlation" sites or shelling out for a $10-15 dollar book, Mangamo's creators hope that potential users will instead be drawn to committing to a lower, monthly fee to get their reading fix as they would a streaming service for television and film.
"I grew up reading manga and watching anime as a child in Japan, and I'm inspired by the global rise of this treasured Japanese form of entertainment," Mangamo's founder and CEO, Buddy Marini says of the service. "Mangamo offers something I've always wanted as a fan: an easy and affordable way to read a ton of new manga while giving back to the publishers and creators so they can continue to make the manga I love."
Mangamo is available on iOS for iPhone and iPad and available for download on the App Store. More information can found on the service's website.