Founded in 2005, BookWalker has been bringing manga, light novels, webcomics, and audiobooks to audiences globally. At launch, the original version of the site was structured for a Japanese consumer as that was the primary audience. As a user at its U.S. launch, I adapted to BookWalker’s interface. However, compared to other digital comic platforms, it was trickier to use. Now, the site has been fully revamped to be more accessible to an international audience. As M12 Media, both Sam Pinansky and Isabell Castro have tailored the new experience by putting readers first and connecting them to stories they might not have considered reading before.
K Comics Beat spoke with Pinansky on growing BookWalker’s audience as well as a general reflection back on how far the publishing platform has come.
How long did the planning process take?
Pinansky: When the global site launched, it was just a translation of the Japanese BookWalker site. Even though there’s been updates and changes. It hasn’t changed that much. Everything was almost the same. It was only three years ago that we started charging in dollars, which was a limitation of the system until they changed it when they enabled it for foreign currency transactions. Not just for BookWalker Global but for BookWalker Thai and other places.
We built everything from the app and the database from scratch. We’re running on our own independent system now. It wasn’t tied only to the needs of the consumer but also the needs of the business. We were discussing the management of BookWalker Global from the Japanese BookWalker to be managed by the overseas company. Our company, M12 Media was ultimately chosen to do that.
The management was switched over about a year ago from Japan to us, and we’d been borrowing the Japanese system while we were building from scratch. It’s been about one year.
There’s been a large concern by the manga and Japanese light novel community about the future of digital purchases. This is because of the actions of payment processers like Mastercard and Visa. Do readers have anything to worry about possibly losing access to series they have previously purchased?
Pinansky: Although we have some racier content on our site, we don’t sell any pornographic content on our site. There are titles marked as mature and in order to access them, you have to login and attest you’re over 18. We’re paying attention to the laws and follow it based on the jurisdiction. This is different from payment processors, which is a separate issue. They can make decisions off of their own risk tolerance for certain businesses. We use Stripe for our processing as well PayPal. Those options are the same as before. There is one layer between us and Visa/Mastercard. We can only do what we can with consistent filtering on mature titles. We’re clear on our stance that we’re not selling material that violates the terms of service for our payment processors.
I can guarantee that people who have purchased are not going away. If we have to modify our catalogue to continue to operate, that is something we’d have to negotiate with our publishers in the future. If there’s a book that we can’t sell because of XYZ reason, that’s a problem for the publisher. If you can buy it on Amazon, you can buy it on BookWalker.
Since our new relaunch, we have the ability to download license files, which will allow you to read books on third party applications. Coming soon to Kobo, which is already available in Kobo EU, but not in the US yet. That will enable people to backup their content. Not just if the content goes away, but also if BookWalker goes away, it won’t invalidate their license. This should give people the confidence to feel like they have ownership over content they buy.
What is the split of users between the app and the deskto?
Pinansky: BookWalker: Manga & Novels is the existing app and is the Japanese app localized to your country. It’s not going away but the new app is linked to our site and our website. That’s the one they need to download to access their books they bought on our platform.
As for the split between mobile and desktop users, our site is mobile browser compatible. There’s a difference between the purchasing and the reading. Reading split its 50/50 between native app vs. non-native app. n terms of purchasing, it’s still higher on the web because before our revamp you could only buy currency on Android and not on iOS. In-app purchases are now available for both. Anything you can do on the desktop you can do on the app. You couldn’t do that before. There’s more mobile focus on our redesign than before. Devices are getting bigger and faster.
What is the gender split for BookWalker’s readership?
Pinansky: BookWalker is mostly men. Almost all other digital manga platforms have an even split. The vertical scrolling platforms have a heavy female readership. BookWalker’s readership might be more male than J-Novel Club readership.
BookWalker is the biggest place for light novels, and until very recently, had a male skewing readership. Much of BookWalker’s sales and activities were focused on light novels, which pumped our male demographic. I think there’s some DNA from the Japanese BookWalker store that has always been heavily male. That’s not true for other e-book stores in Japan like Comic Seymour Bookshelf. BookWalker has always served the male otaku demographic. It’s only recently that we’ve started to add as many BL novels and BL manga targeted for females. We always had Shoujo titles but not as emphasized. We added more than 3000 Harlequin manga.
We’re continuing to grow the female readership on BookWalker. The redesign helped a lot, but I don’t know if the redesign affected the gender split. But the busy UI that contained more information is more familiar with the core Japanese otaku demographic.
But with our content and expansion plans, we’ll make things more parity. As light novels continue to be 80% male and 20% female and our revenue continues to be 50% light novels, I don’t think that’s changing soon. The best way to increase the female demographic is to increase the number of people who read digital manga and webtoons. We have the content, but we want to make sure people know it’s a place to read content like that. Promotion wise, we’re good at being equally split but we’re looking to grow that audience over time.
What is the growth of audio books, manga, light novels, etc. in the U.S.?
Pinansky: We can’t talk about this without talking about COVID. It introduced a new audience to reading novels and manga, light novels, etc. for the first time. It’s persisted in many ways, and manga has become a bigger market than it’s ever been before. We’ve seen in significant pullback in the digital novel range. There’s more light novels being published in English, but the sales per volume have dropped in the past two years. Maybe it’s content quality and even oversaturation of the market. It might have transitioned to audio books as the new generation have grown up.
J-Novel Club has also changed some of the ways it does business. We’re coming out with more print edition of things and that’s the strategy moving forward. We’re careful with print because it’s expensive: prices, shipping, etc. We’ve been utilizing something called print on demand technology to make high quality prints of low runs to reduce risk. We’ve been expanding a number of audio books we produce at J-Novel Club with partnerships with RB media and Podium and producing some of it ourselves.
Print is challenging. It’s part of the strategy at J-Novel Club. For BookWalker, we’re working together with publishers like J-Novel Club to link back to the website where print editions are available.
Are there series that are popular on BookWalker because of anime adaptations?
Pinansky: Yes, if something is popular in Japan it’s usually popular in the US. Often times, when there’s an anime adaptation of a light novel, the response is that they’ve either read it or known about the title. It’s rarer to hear that people have no heard or read a title anymore as companies like J-Novel Club continue to expand it.
There are times where books become popular in the US where they weren’t in Japan. Love Bullet, published by our partners at Yen Press, was saved from cancellation due to the overseas support. Pretty sure there’s no anime adaptation for that yet, but wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
The media mix is becoming more about global sales. Kadokawa is the parent company of BookWalker. They’re not only looking to make anime adaptation out of popular things in Japan but also overseas for original IP that they can turn into manga and anime in the future. They have manga and writing contests that have been very successful with silent manga, one without dialogue. It’s a smart idea because you don’t have to worry about not understanding the language or translation. I’d license this but they could just publish it themselves. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the next hit manga that gets turned into an anime by a non-Japanese person but is produced, animated, and has input from Japanese publishing companies like Kadokawa.
The globalization of manga is on pace and I think it’s a good thing. Even Japanese mangaka are looking at overseas support and finding it more important to their business. It used to be that mangaka were nose to the grindstone and only cared about the number of copies were printed. Everything overseas was just gravy. That’s changed and people are posting their manga on Pixiv and X, and using that popularity to publish in Japan.
Being a creator is not just about making your work and hoping someone sees it; it’s about marketing. I would say Japan and Japanese creators have been behind the curve since that’s been a thing in English for a while now. If you’re a creator in Japan and you want to be successful, you have to interact with your fans and the most successful ones are doing that now. That is driving that push towards a global audience. It’s a difficult transition for a lot of people. Those manga editors who have been editing for 20 years, they don’t like having to deal with overseas people.
But all the young people are all for it. It’s a generation change and the next 5-10 years are going to be very insightful.
There’s a period where BookWalker brought guests to conventions. Is BookWalker looking to expand on that?
Pinansky: Yeah, J-Novel Club and Anime Boston brought the author of Apothecary Diaries for a number of panels. We helped to field questions and answer questions. The author was there with an outfit. Obviously, this is an entirely new management. We’ll also be going to other conventions as well as we know how cool it is for fans to get connections to creators like that.
Do you have any interest in having a presence at comic conventions?
Pinansky: We’re a digital comics platform and the book trade shows like the US book shows in NY are focused on print. We don’t have that much staff, and we can’t devote that much time to events and event planning. We need to focus on expanding our catalogue and curating it. We’re spending a lot of time through the metadata from the migration so everything is translated properly. Fixing tag issues, etc.
Actually, we’re cleaning up a platform that’s existed for over 10 years. When you change an entire system, it’s like moving houses and you clean house. We’re working behind the scenes that might sound boring, but when it comes to UX on the site, that makes us different from Amazon and Google Play. Things are categorized incorrectly and a black box algorithm and sponsored posts. We’re trying to be for manga fans by manga fans.
We have three or four publishers to put new comics and manga into our platform. We’re looking to expand into the Korean webtoon and Chinese webtoons as well as novels. There’s all kinds of content we don’t sell right now but we think would be appropriate for our audience and that they’d be interested in. And also to help grow a new audience, and people who haven’t tried BookWalker.
Our platform doesn’t have to be just for Japanese content and we already have some original English content and Korean content from Ize Press, but we could always have more. We have about 140,000 chapters on our site and I’d love to grow that to 250,000 in a year, and we’ll see if we can get there.
