News

Manga Library Z Digital Manga Service Shuts Down on November 26

Manga Toshokan Z" (Manga Library Z), a digital service for publishing rare out-of-print manga for free, announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down on November 26. According to the website and founder/manga creator Ken Akamatsu (Love Hina, Negima!), the website had issues with credit card companies and a termination of all payment services. After careful consideration of how to rebuild its operations, the company decided to shut down due to payment services being unavailable.

The staff is continuing to discuss ways to restart the site, such as through transitioning to a non-profit organization or crowdfunding.

Manga creator Akamatsu founded the service originally known as J-Comi's "Zeppan Manga Toshokan" in 2011 and launched a beta test of the site in 2010. The advertising revenue-based service distributes hard-to-find manga and publishes it for free, returning the revenue to the original creators.

Akamatsu and Yahoo! Japan subsidiary GyaO! jointly founded a subsidiary company called J Comic Terrace in 2015 to take over management and control of the service, which was also renamed at the time to Manga Library Z. Akamatsu later retired from management. He stated at the time, "I started J-Comi with the goal of eliminating piracy, but because I'm serializing a weekly series, there are parts of it I've been unable to manage. GYAO came to me proposing an injection of capital and to help me manage the project."

Akamatsu initially posted all 14 volumes of his Love Hina manga for free with six pages of advertising and no digital rights management (DRM) for one month to test the viability of the business model. Japanese publishers Shueisha and Kodansha began collaborating with the site in 2010.

The site gained notoriety in 2011 when it posted Seiji Matsuyama's Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei (My Wife Is an Elementary Student) manga, which Naoki Inose, Tokyo Vice Governor at the time, cited as an example of which manga should be restricted under Tokyo's then-recently revised Youth Healthy Development Ordinance. Though the site was only available in Japanese, it launched an English and foreign-language version beta test for select titles in 2011.

The site offered digitally watermarked PDF versions of its manga for download. It also had a premium membership service. Its viewer offered automated translation to over 51 languages.

Sources: Manga Library Z, Ken Akamatsu's X/Twitter account