Chokuyomi (ちょく読み)

» see chokuyomi.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Chokuyomi was carrier-only at the billing layer, and that is the detail that kept it inside Japan. To buy a book you went through a menu on a Japanese handset and the charge landed on a Japanese phone bill. There was no card involved and no account that moved with you, so no version of this ever worked on a phone bought in Ankara. The entire storefront existed downstream of a mobile operator's billing relationship.

Kadokawa Mobile opened it on 16 June 2006 as an ebook site for i-mode, and the listing in the i-mode menu carried a better name than the service did: 一冊ウリキリ, one book, sold outright. That was the whole proposition. Nothing was rented and nothing was bundled. A magazine column started at a hundred yen including tax and a paperback novel ran to about three hundred, and when you paid, the file was yours on that handset. It reached Yahoo! Keitai on 18 April 2007 and ran on EZweb as well.

The catalog is the reason it mattered to anyone. Kadokawa put its light novel imprints into it, Dengeki Bunko and Famitsu Bunko among them, with MediaWorks and Fujimi Shobo titles on the same shelf. Japanese light novels were a paperback format read on commutes by people who already had a phone in their hand, and this took the top-selling imprints in that category and put them one menu press away, four years before Kadokawa built the store that eventually replaced it.

~ the record ~

~ the carrier menus ~

Being an official i-mode site carried real commercial weight. It meant docomo listed you in its own menu hierarchy, somewhere below the weather and the news, and users found you by scrolling rather than by typing an address. That placement was the distribution, and it was granted by the carrier.

The operating company behind it changed names more often than the product did. Kadokawa Mobile was founded on 1 December 2005, became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Marketing on 1 April 2008, and then on 1 October 2009 was merged together with Movie Gate and Kadokawa Incubation and renamed Kadokawa Content Gate. By the end the pages were footed with the BookWalker name. Chokuyomi outlived three of its own parent's org charts.

~ from per-book to per-month ~

Somewhere around 2013 the thing stopped being a bookshop. The smartphone version sold 読み放題 tickets at 290 yen a month, later restructured as 250 points a month, and the catalog narrowed hard onto boys-love and teens-love comics rather than the light novels it had opened with. Payment moved to carrier billing on docomo and au, with a credit card as the alternative.

What makes the late period strange is who it was competing with. The 2014 pages advertise a 姉妹サイト, a sister site, called BOOK☆WALKER 読み放題, at 499 yen a month plus tax. Kadokawa was running two subscription reading services beside each other, one at 290 yen and one at 499, and pointing customers of the cheaper one at the more expensive one from inside its own interface. Chokuyomi was never folded into BOOK☆WALKER. It was left to run until it was switched off, with the replacement already on the page.

~ the banner on the landing page ~

By March 2013 the old chokuyomi.jp feature-phone addresses had been pointed at bookwalker.co.jp/yomi/, a landing page under the parent brand. The last surviving capture of that page, from 19 December 2014, carries the only closure notice anyone has: a banner headed 【重要】 and announcing that the Chokuyomi ebook delivery service would end on Friday 30 January 2015. For details, it says, please refer to the announcement inside the smartphone site.

That announcement does not exist anywhere. The smartphone hosts have no captures at all across the window it sat in, which takes with it the stated reason and the refund terms for anyone who had already bought books. An eight-year-old store closed with one sentence and a pointer to a page nobody saved.

The domain went through the usual sequence afterward, and faster than most. By August 2015 chokuyomi.jp was serving a 502-byte stub. By April 2016 it was a Sedo parking page asking a thousand US dollars for the name. Everything after that belongs to somebody else: the captures from 2017 onward show an unrelated car-sharing blog sitting on the address where Kadokawa used to sell novels by the volume.

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