Niconico Shoseki (ニコニコ書籍)

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

~ the last words ~

It opened as a reader first, and Dwango said so at the time. Kawakami Nobuo shared the launch stage on 8 November 2011 with Kadokawa Tsuguhiko, Tsuda Daisuke moderating, and his line was that Niconico had no intention of building a sales platform. The intention was to add a new experience to books. For the first eleven months, paid titles were bought over at BOOK☆WALKER and merely read here, inside a tab of ニコニコ静画 called 電子書籍.

On 24 October 2012 it became a bookshop after all. One hundred and twenty-four publishers signed on, Shueisha and Kodansha among them, with roughly 32,000 titles on day one and Niconico points as the money. Ban Ryuichiro, who ran Dwango's planning and development division, gave ITmedia the headline himself: Niconico intends to become a bookshop. By mid-December an ITmedia reporter counted 36,773 titles in the store's own search results.

The renewal of 19 September 2017 is when the long name went away. The Flash viewer that had carried it since 2011 was replaced and iOS moved to direct in-app purchase. The store took its own domain at nicoebook.jp and put ニコニコ書籍 on the sign. The same renewal abolished ニコ書券, an iOS-only scrip where one point was one yen, and Dwango refunded unused balances in cash by bank transfer through to 28 February 2018, paying the transfer fees itself.

What this store was actually selling was a crowd, and the crowd wrote in Japanese over books licensed to Japanese accounts. No international edition was ever built. From anywhere else, the comment layer was a thing you could read descriptions of without ever watching it work.

~ the record ~

~ a comment that knew which panel ~

Comments crossed the page right to left, the same direction and the same machinery as on a Niconico video, with the page dimming slightly behind the text so you could still read underneath it. On its own that is a gimmick. What made it a design was 範囲指定コメント, the ranged comment, which let you underline a line of prose or draw a ring around one manga panel so your remark attached to that region rather than sailing past the whole spread.

Dwango knew it did not suit every book. Comments were enabled per title, and the launch release footnotes it without embarrassment: whether you can post or read comments differs by work. Kurimoto of Kadokawa Content Gate said the same thing out loud on launch day, that he did not consider every work suited to a comment feature.

~ sorted by newest argument ~

The default sort order in the store tells you what Dwango thought it had. Search results came back as コメントが新しい順, newest comment first, which floated the books people were currently arguing over above the books that were selling.

The rest of the furniture pointed the same way. A title page carried user tags and its entry in ニコニコ大百科. Below that sat a ニコニコ市場 rail of related products and 応援POP, fan illustrations posted as shelf-talkers in the way a bookshop staffer writes a card and props it against a stack. Sharing to Twitter deep-linked to the exact page you were standing on, and the most-retweeted comment on a title got printed onto the 帯, the paper band wrapped around a Japanese book, on that title's product page.

Two more things in the same spirit: ブロマガ posts opened in the same viewer as the books, and in April 2018, five months before the end, it became the first official distribution platform for 二次創作 work from Touhou Project.

~ they drew the merger as a wedding ~

The banner Dwango hung on the store's front page to announce the end shows an anime bride and groom under falling petals. The bride's sash reads ニコニコ書籍, and the headline asks every user to please read this important notice. A corporate app merger, illustrated as a wedding. KADOKAWA had bought Dwango in 2014, and by 2018 the group was running two ebook stores against each other, which is context rather than a reason, because no reason was ever given.

The dates are exact. New releases stopped arriving on 24 September. At noon on 25 September the two apps became one and sales stopped. The site went read-only that same hour. The old app stopped allowing fresh downloads on 31 October, and on 31 December every function in it stopped, login included. The browser viewer outlived all of that and was still serving pages in March 2025. The domain has since gone.

Books people had already paid for carried over without being paid for twice, and Niconico points went on spending at BOOK☆WALKER. Two categories did not make the crossing: limited-time free books, and rental titles with a reading window attached, of which the store had listed more than eight thousand at its paid launch. That ran in a footnote.

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