Manga Rock

» see mangarock.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Manga Rock was a reader. It launched in 2010 from a Vietnamese studio calling itself Not a Basement Studio, and what it did was gather up the scanlations already scattered across the web and put them behind an app that worked offline and did not fight you. The reading experience was the product. The library came from other people's unpaid translation work and from publishers who had licensed none of it.

It got enormous. MUSO's measurements put it above The Pirate Bay for traffic. SimilarWeb ranked it second in books and literature worldwide, behind Wattpad and ahead of everything with a publisher attached. A phone app built over pirated Japanese comics had become one of the largest reading destinations on the internet, which says less about the app than about how badly manga was being distributed in every language other than Japanese.

Then on 2 September 2019 the studio said it was closing the whole thing down, and did.

~ the case file ~

~ the turn ~

The statement was unusually direct for this genre. As we made contact with more publishers and creators, the studio wrote, we realized that by keeping Manga Rock around while developing the new platform, we are still inadvertently hosting and supporting the practices of piracy.

The apps came off the App Store and Google Play in the first week of September 2019, and after that the largest manga library in the world was a phone icon that no longer downloaded. TorrentFreak noted at the time that rights holders had probably been applying pressure, which is likely enough, but pressure normally produces a domain move rather than a company spending its own money to license the thing it used to take.

~ 23 april 2020 ~

The website outlived the apps by seven months, running under the name MR Comics while the replacement was built. On 23 April 2020 it went dark and INKR Comics opened in beta on iOS and Android, carrying licensed work from Tokyopop and a set of smaller publishers who had agreed to be there.

mangarock.com today does not go to a parked page or a domain broker. It redirects into a Google cloud function belonging to INKR. The company did not die. It changed what it was doing and left the old address pointing at the new job.

~ from the outside ~

I read none of this. Manga never had the foothold in Turkey that it had in France or Brazil, and by 2015 I was in my thirties and reading things with page numbers. What I recognize is the shape of the thing rather than the thing itself, because the same argument had already been had about music fifteen years earlier, in a country where the legal option arrived roughly a decade after the illegal one.

The difference is what happened at the end. Napster was closed by other people. Manga Rock closed itself while it was winning, and then went and asked for permission.

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