Q: If every manga publisher decides to publish their online manga on Crunchyroll's platform, would the Crunchyroll website then act as a hub to access all of these individual publishers' websites?
Kun Gao: No, I don't think so. I think what needs to be more clearly explained from our side is that there is a consortium of publishers - the Japanese manga consortium - and what they're thinking of right now is how to grow digital manga business worldwide, including digital distribution, focusing on supporting all the local publishers. For example, there will be a website - a directory - of all available manga, and if there's a local distributor for that manga. The website will point to that local distributor.
Q: So if publishers are interested in working with Crunchyroll to offer online manga on their websites, can you walk me through what they need to do?
Kun Gao: Either they can contact us - or Bitway - if they want, they can provide their own content, or use content that hasn't already been licensed that Bitway will help clear with the Japanese publishers that are in their consortium. Publishers can start by either embedding the player we're developing, or potentially having us power their entire site, but with their brand and content.
PLUG-AND-PLAY ONLINE PUBLISHING: PROVIDING A 'WHITE LABEL' MANGA VIEWER
Q: Can you explain more specifically what kind of services Crunchyroll will be offering to publishers?
Kun Gao: The service is the use of the platform. All publishers or local distributors need to do is either provide us with a physical book or digital files which they upload via administrative consoles and tools. Once they do that, they can go in and start editing. For example, they can edit the series name, the price point they want to set for readers to buy and read the manga, how many pages they want to show as a free preview, the devices they want to enable, the language and regions they want to enable, and which age range they want that content to be targeted to.
With all this, publishers can go ahead and use our just our manga viewer, or they can have us go ahead and white-label their entire site (use the entire Crunchyroll online publishing and management suite and brand it with their logos and graphics). If they do that, all of these features can be made available onto their site immediately.
Our business model here is we try to grow the digital manga business. The publishers and distributors make money, and we take a small cut of that for powering and enabling their business.
Q: So it's like a software licensing fee?
Kun Gao: More like a revenue share.
Q: Are you able to share the names of any publishers you're currently talking with, or have signed on for this service?
Kun Gao: Just to emphasize an earlier point, Crunchyroll is not directly licensing content from Japanese publishers. In terms of the consortium of publishers that want to enable digital distribution of comics content overseas, this group includes every publisher in Japan, including Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kodansha. In terms of local publishers and distributors, we want to have everyone come on board to leverage and use all the great tools we've built. We want to have everyone be a part of this ecosystem.
Q: Several companies have started to launch their online manga readers in the past year — VIZ has Shonensunday.com and Sigikki.com. Yen Press is publishing their monthly manga/manhwa magazine Yen Plus online. Morning Magazine is going to do Morningmanga.com. Square Enix is opening their own Digital Manga Store in both English and French.
Every one of these publishers seem to be using something a slightly different for their online manga readers. And then there's the Western online comics publishing companies like comiXology and Panel Fly. How would Crunchyroll's platform fit into this landscape?
Kun Gao: It’s definitely up to each local distributors if they want to leverage our platform or not. It’s their choice to build their own. I would say that while I can’t really speak for how well their experience has been, we definitely pride ourselves on our technology competency. Our core competency is being able to build consumer products. We want to build the best possible manga reading experience, and we want to have the publishers and the local distributors filling the bookshelf.
SHONEN JUMPIN' JACK FLASH, JAVA, AND ONLINE MANGA VIEWERS
Q: So when you’re talking about a "player," what kind of programming language are you using for this online manga viewer? Is it Java or is it Flash-based?
Kun Gao: This is something that we won't disclose until we start our beta program, but we definitely want to make sure it's accessible for all viewers.
Q: When you talk about "all viewers," are you also talking about digital reading devices like cell phones, Kindles and iPads?
Kun Gao: Yeah, people are using devices a lot, and mobile media consumption devices are becoming the standard for consuming this kind of content. We're quite conscious of that. We want to bring this content to as many devices as possible.
Q: One thing that I've heard from readers is that some publishers that have already put their manga content online are not taking into consideration some of the viewing constraints that are particular to the various digital devices.
For example, if comics that were originally formatted for print was viewed in an iPad as is, the text would need to be in a bigger font. Or, if not bigger text, then you need to be able to zoom in to the panels. It's not just a matter of shrinking the page to fit the screen; sometimes there are real readability issues when you display digital content in different devices.
Kun Gao: Exactly. Those are the sorts of things our platform is expressly designed to address. We want to make sure it's a great experience to begin with, and the big local distributors or the publishers can bring in their content and it'll all be a really great user experience. That's really one of the benefits of being able to provide a common platform. You really have to find out all of those issues, so you can make sure everyone has a really good experience, regardless of which company or which content you're reading.
