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J-Comi, Google Work on Comic Viewer With Foreign Support

posted on by Egan Loo
Negima's Akamatsu to add personalized ads, reader comments to site for out-of-print manga

Manga creator Ken Akamatsu (Negima! Magister Negi Magi, Love Hina) revealed last Wednesday that his manga distribution site J-Comi is collaborating with the information technology company Google on comic viewer software with "dynamic advertising" and overseas support. J-Comi currently serves free, PDF-formatted manga with unchanging, embedded advertising in Japanese.

With the new comic viewer that J-Comi is developing with Google, Akamatsu said that American readers can see advertising from American businesses. In addition, the advertising can automatically change every time a manga is read, depending on the country, local time, interests of the reader.

Akamatsu also plans to allow readers to enter and save comments next to every page of a manga. With this feature, he suggests that fans can offer volunteer translations, add footnotes to explain keywords, interact with other fans, and other possibilities.

Last month, the website revealed the three titles that will appear on the website during its second beta test period, which starts on January 11. The three new titles will be the following:

Belmonde Le VisiteuR
Shōei Ishioka
3 volumes
Shueisha (Weekly Shonen Jump, 2007)



Hōkago Wedding (Afterschool Wedding)
Mayu Shinjo
50-page one-shot story
Never before published



Kōtsū Jiko Kanteinin Tamaki Rinichirō (Rinichirō Tamaki, Traffic Accident Investigator)
Takashi Kisaki, Kengo Kaji
18 volumes
Shueisha (Super Jump, 1996-2001)




These three titles are part of a larger collaboration between J-Comi and the Japanese publishers Shueisha and Kodansha. The site currently has Akamatsu's Love Hina, which has been downloaded 2.3 million times in the first month of the first beta test period. Akamatsu had previously said that he wants to add parody dōjinshi (self-published works), with ad revenues going to both the dōjinshi artists and the original creators of the works being parodied.

Thanks to Cloud668 for the news tip on the second best test.

Source: animeanime.biz, Internet Watch

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