Thanks! We’re also really proud of our partnership with smaller publishers like Kaiten Books, Star Fruit Books, and Glacier Bay Books. It’s been great sharing their titles with more fans.
The simulpub model is definitely expensive to run at scale, especially if the localization staff is paid fairly, which is something we believe in very strongly. We’re currently experimenting with some other models as well, including serializing completed series one chapter at a time. There’s a balancing act between quality and speed obviously, and one nice thing about releasing digitally on a streaming service is that we can more easily experiment to find the right balance compared to a print publisher.
All titles on our service are available worldwide outside of Japan and we support payments worldwide by Credit Card on the website and Apple/Google on our mobile apps.
You may like "Blame!" (pronounced BLAM). It's not a similar story at all as it's more hard sci-fi action but may be up your alley. Let me know if you end up liking it.
I am curious how this pricing model affect the publishers/creators. I understand that from the consumer point of view, it looks quite appealing but wonder if for the players in the other side it would be the same.
Is the idea that in the long term there will be a bigger user base paying for this new model which translates into a higher revenue stream than the actual one even if they end paying way less compared to buying those titles individually?
You got it right! Since each user is paying less per chapter read, you need more subscribers on the service to surpass the revenue that would have been received with a-la-carte only. And there is a huge opportunity to get more subscribers paying to read than there are people paying under the traditional a-la-carte structure due to the much lower barrier to entry. This is exactly how Crunchyroll pushed the anime industry forward where physical sales are mostly downstream from digital subscription services.
Unfortunately publishers are not providing the the rights for content to be released in Japan through foreign services like Azuki. If we can make it work, we will.
The simulpub model is definitely expensive to run at scale, especially if the localization staff is paid fairly, which is something we believe in very strongly. We’re currently experimenting with some other models as well, including serializing completed series one chapter at a time. There’s a balancing act between quality and speed obviously, and one nice thing about releasing digitally on a streaming service is that we can more easily experiment to find the right balance compared to a print publisher.