Buka Manga

» see buka.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Buka Manga started in 2011 in Zhuhai, on the Guangdong coast an hour from Macau, and it grew the way every manga reader of that era grew: by hosting work nobody had paid for. Chinese-language scanlations of Japanese series, free, on a phone, with a reading experience better than the websites. That got it past fifty million registered accounts and made Zhuhai Buka Technology the largest manga platform in the country.

Then in 2015 it started taking the library down. No court order was ever reported behind it. The company made this as a business decision and went out to negotiate authorized simplified-Chinese digital rights, series by series, publisher by publisher. Takeshobo signed. Ichijinsha signed. Authorized Takeshobo titles went live on 24 April 2016, and by then Buka had been deleting the unauthorized ones for over a year.

The users noticed immediately and they were not grateful. The Zhihu threads from that period are one long version of the same question, sometimes phrased with genuine confusion: why has Buka pulled every Japanese title when the other apps have pulled nothing, and why are those other apps now bigger.

~ the record ~

~ going legitimate ~

The pivot came with real money behind it. Buka closed a 100 million yuan Series B in November 2015, while the deletions were still going on, and pushed into everything adjacent: original Chinese comics, offline anime conventions, merchandise, game publishing. In January 2016 Bilibili announced a joint publishing deal with Buka for a mobile game. Buka had read where Chinese anime money was heading and was early to most of it. Bilibili still got there first.

~ the quiet exit ~

Regulators put the app on notice in November 2020 over user-rights and safety problems in version 2.4.1.7, which in that market is a routine bureaucratic scolding rather than a death sentence. The actual end came almost three years later. In August 2023 the service stopped, and Wikipedia's Chinese article records what is unusual about it: there was no prior notification. No farewell post and no window to export anything.

How the creators found out is the part worth recording. Japanese authors serialized on Buka published notices saying they were moving because their previous platform had gone bankrupt. The obituary was written by the people it had been paying, in the announcements they had to make to their own readers.

~ what it looked like from here ~

None of this reached Turkey and none of it was ever going to. Buka was simplified-Chinese only, on Chinese app stores, licensing Japanese work for a domestic market of hundreds of millions. What does carry across is the shape of the decision it made in 2015, because a lot of sites in a lot of countries faced the same one. Buka is the case where a platform chose the legal library, spent eight more years on it, and still ended up in liquidation while the readers it lost were reading somewhere else. Bilibili Manga is where most of them went, and where most of the authors went after.

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