Like most magazines, Shonen Jump has undergone changes over the years to keep up with the changing marketplace. It stopped releasing physical magazines in 2012, and then it went to simultaneous publication for its series in early 2013.
Since then, though, VIZ’s manga magazine has been relatively stable. A single issue of the magazine cost 99c or a year’s worth for $26, which is pretty much in line with other digital magazines or services. Occasionally, some Shueisha series were available for free as a simul-pub (Boys Over Flowers Season 2, RIN-NE), and in recent years, VIZ has been adding some free chapters of their back catalog, particularly those under the Shonen Jump label.
At the beginning of December, VIZ announced they were revamping Shonen Jump subscriptions.
Now, the new Shonen Jump platform has officially launched. New chapters are now published Sundays — the same date as Japan — instead of Mondays. From now on, though, chapters are not collected into a digital magazine; they appear under their series’ section of the VIZ website and VIZ/Shonen Jump apps. In exchange, the latest three chapters are now completely free. Or fans can pay $1.99 and read most of the manga under the Shonen Jump label for $1.99 a month. More series are also planned to be added to both, and a free seven-day trial is available.
Of course, there are some trade-offs. Subscribers will no longer receive free Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, which is the reason why some people had a membership. (And some players, evidently, had multiple accounts.)
Eliminating the magazine format means that the bonus material like interviews, previews, and news will no longer be available on a regular basis. Some of this may be available in, say, blog posts, but fans would have to search for it rather than coming across it automatically while reading the latest issue of Shonen Jump. Finally, fans are limited to 100 chapters per day, so there’s no way to blaze through all of a long-running manga in a single day. The current list is shown in this fast-moving graphic on the website, but Yu Yu Hakusho, Hunter x Hunter, and Knights of the Zodiac (Saint Seiya) are three that I noticed right away that are missing.
In addition, since this is a subscription, you don’t own anything. People who stopped paying for the digital version of Shonen Jump still own those issues, but here, once you stop paying, you have nothing to go back and access.
They are also eliminating the “Jump Start” feature where select new series were published in English the same time as in Japan. However, this is supposed to mean more series being published overall, so this may not be a negative. It just depends on what you like and what Shonen Jump decides to license and whether if they’re going to find ways for English fans to suggest series they want to see.
Why the Revamp?
Now the reason why this is happening is obvious: VIZ and Shueisha obviously want to put a dagger in the most common excuses scanlators and scanlation readers use:
- “I can’t afford to pay almost $30 a year!”
- “It’s not worth it to me to pay $1 for just one series.”
- “I needed to go back and reread an arc, and I shouldn’t have to pay $6.99 a volume to do so.”
Having the latest three chapters available means that fans have three weeks to catch up on a series — plenty of time to read them even if life becomes hectic.
As for the regions, it seems like the subscriptions are limited to the following countries:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Ireland
- New Zealand
- Australia
- South Africa
- Philippines
- Singapore
- India
However, I see no indication that you have to be in one of these areas to just be able to read on the website. The app, however, may not be available in App Stores and Google Play stores outside of these territories. But there’s a Japanese manga app that’s supposed to be limited to Japan-only and they’ve been happily taking my money for months, so even if it’s not technically available in your region, you might want to give it a try. This would eliminate another popular pirating excuse — the “not available in my country” reason. If there’s still region blocks, fans could also turn to something like a VPN, although that may be going into a gray area as far as legal issues are concerned.
The New Platform
I played around with both the site reader and the apps. You can browse and access the free manga on both the VIZ app and Shonen Jump app, so no reason to own both from what I saw. The latter is good if you have no intention of buying or sampling any other manga or want an easier time to jump into the free chapters. For longer chapters, there’s a jump-to at the top for every 25 or 50 chapters. The site doesn’t have this feature, but there you can see what chapter goes with which volume, which is nice if you know what volume you last finished off at.
However, I found the online reader a bit annoying, as every time I clicked on a chapter, it defaulted to looking like this in my browser (Firefox):
But the calendar feature is nice to see when the next chapter is coming out.
Final Thoughts
So while I prefer the app, if you don’t have a mobile device, for the price, you still can’t beat the value. Anyone who still turns to scanlations for series like My Hero Academia, Boruto, and most other manga from the Japanese Shonen Jump are most likely pirates who are going to use any excuse to read on scanlation sites, like reading before the street date in Japan or faulting the translation. Certainly there are families where every dollar counts, but $2 a month is certainly affordable — to the point that it almost seems too cheap. I mean, let’s say you are in the mood to reread Bleach. To own a single volume is $5 if you find it on sale. But even if you reread it over the course of three months (7 chapters a day — say an hour a day), that’s still only $1 more to read the entire series. You could do this many times and still be way ahead of the $370 to own it.
Even if $24 a year is a struggle, a user could read the one or two series they really want to tread in that time. A birthday gift from a relative, taking online surveys — there are ways to afford that subscription on a tight budget.
So, in short, fans pretty much get a win-win situation here. They either get access to most of the back catalog for dirt cheap or get the latest chapters of some of the most popular manga for free. I’d probably subscribe if I wasn’t in the middle of collecting so many Jump manga that I need to finish reading. But it does make me reconsider starting any new Jump titles, as I could stop collecting three, five volumes a year and be able to read a bunch more manga as well without having to rely on the library for hits like One Piece.