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Manga Library Z Launches Crowdfunding to Reopen Digital Service

The official X (formerly Twitter) account for Manga Toshokan Z (Manga Library Z), a digital service for publishing rare out-of-print manga for free, changed its name to "Kaette Kuru Manga Toshokan Z" (Manga Toshokan Z Will Return) on Monday, and launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Motion Gallery website on Wednesday. The campaign aims to raise 3 million yen (about US$20,000) to reopen the service.

As of press time, the campaign has raised 1,279,055 yen (about US$8,300). The campaign will end on April 1.

Manga creator Ken 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 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.

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."

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.

Over the past two years, numerous sites and services in Japan have had to disallow payments from various services such as Visa and Mastercard, due to customer payments being refused through those services. Such sites include, but are not limited to: Niconico, Melonbooks and Toranoana, DLSite (which also disallowed American Express), Fantia, Fanza, and pictSPACE, among others.

Cietan Kitney, President of Visa Worldwide Japan, confirmed in November that while Visa wants to make its payment service available to legal and legitimate products and services as much as possible, it may sometimes decline purchases to "protect the brand."

Sources: Manga Library Z X/Twitter account, Motion Gallery, IT Media News