For more than 10 years BookWalker Global – operated by M12 Media LLC (part of the KADOKAWA Group) – has offered digital manga, manhwa, light novels, and audiobooks to a global audience as an offshoot of the Japanese website. During that time it has grown significantly, with over 79,000 books on offer from over 100 publishers.
Late last month, the digital storefront underwent a massive overhaul. Now known as BookWalker, the global site feels distinct from the original site. Not only that, but it also features a new web design and app, new features, and more flexibility in how you can read manga.
How To Love Comics spoke to BookWalker CEO Sam Pinansky about the move to the new platform. We discuss the undertaking of moving to a new platform, design choices for the new website, how the new Lightweight Content Protection (LCP) DRM works, and so much more.
How To Love Comics: First of all, congratulations on the new platform launch. Migrating from one platform to another is always a huge undertaking. How did you feel it went?
Sam Pinansky: It was definitely touch and go there during the first few hours: We had all the typical issues with these sorts of things: database updates taking longer than in testing, 3rd party providers having to be switched out last moment, and good old human error like me having a typo that missed migrating everyone’s audiobooks for about 5 hours…. But we got everything done: over 200,000 user accounts and nearly 8 million owned ebooks transferred over, and I’m proud to say that almost every active user has migrated their accounts now after only a couple weeks! Now we have the important task of making sure to fix any minor bugs, tweaking design issues now that we have a site with active users and data, and of course working on the next batch of features to drop.
HTLC: The thing I noticed when going onto the revamped BookWalker website was the new design. For better or worse, the previous design felt very much like a Japanese website. What was the mentality when it came to this redesign?
Sam: Well, it’s pretty obvious why the old site looked like a Japanese website: because it was one! It started out as a reskin of the Japanese BookWalker and evolved over the years with its own dedicated front page design, but it was still members of the Japanese design team and Japanese developers that created the old BookWalker Global site. For BookWalker.com it was really important to us to get a look and feel closer to the expectations of an English-speaking audience, and that means, yes, streamlining the design. We simplified things a lot, moved some features into other places, and were deliberate about what information we are showing and where.
HTLC: Was there a similar mentality to the app as well?
Sam: One other good thing about the new site is that the app was developed very much as a first-class citizen, which is not historically how it was developed for the old site. The design language is exactly the same, and there is a features parity between the app and website. Actually that’s not true, the app is actually more fully featured than the website, as currently we only have the audiobook player on the app. (Although we’ll be launching the audiobook player on the web quite soon).
HTLC: The other big feature of the new BookWalker is the introduction of Lightweight Content Protection (LCP) DRM. Can you go into more how this works and how it differs from traditional Digital Rights Management?
Sam: People use the word DRM to refer to a lot of things, but for BookWalker we are using it as an additional way that people can download and read their content they purchase. Rather than being locked to only reading content on our app and website, now you can download license files using this open standard and open them on many compatible devices and software, which allows you to read your content how you choose, as well as back it up locally. The DRM still requires you prove your ownership, so it protects the rights of the publishers and authors, but it gives users more freedom with how they consume the content they own.
HTLC: Will existing BookWalker users have to do anything to enjoy the benefits of the new platform?
Sam: Well, they need to migrate their accounts! Migration is very easy, just go to bookwalker.com and click sign in, then click the big button that will explain how to migrate your account. If you used to login with an email and password it’s as simple as resetting your password, and if you used SSO like Google sign-in before you’ll need a migration code which you can find on the original bookwalker site.
HTLC: One of the challenges of any digital storefront is discoverability. How does the new BookWalker handle this challenge?
Sam: There’s two parts to this question. Discoverability of the website itself and our platform, and then discoverability for specific books that you might want to read ON our platform. For the former, we have a long history as a manga and light novel ebook store, so many people know our name, but we need to work with Google and other search engines to make sure we’re coming as high up in the results as possible!
For the latter, one thing that we have done is integrate a much more granular tagging system into our website, and try to clean up tag data that has frankly been a mess for a long time: this will enable better recommendations internally. We have a lot of work to enhance this though: adding more places where we can suggest content to read, and adding more opportunities for people to try series for free that look interesting to them!
HTLC: What’s next for BookWalker?
Sam: I’ve hinted at a number of things already, but in the short term we’re working on some highly requested features, like offline reading for the app, and a series-based display for your purchased library that will be very helpful to users with large libraries. We’re also working on a new feature to replace the old bookshelves and wishlist sharing that I’ll have more information to share with everyone soon!
HTLC: Finally, what are you been reading lately? What would you recommend to someone looking for something new to read?
Sam: There’s a work that’s near and dear to my heart lately that J-Novel Club is publishing: “Fired? But I Maintain All the Software!” We have the manga and the original light novel is coming out soon. If you are a software engineer you will love this and/or it will give you PTSD.
English (US) · 