Today, I’m taking a look at izneo, another service where manga lovers can get their fix. Is it worth your time?
izneo describes itself as “the first digital comic book reading service”. Launched in 2010 as a collaborative between several publishers, it has become the leading platform for comics in France and Europe. It is available to view on its website as well as apps on Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch. Readers can purchase individual books to be read on izneo or read some titles for free as part of their $7.99 a month subscription plan.
When you sign up, you have the option to choose genres so that izneo can better recommend series for you or skip it for later. There’s also a pretty obvious typo here, but that is because the English word genre is “gender” in French, which originated from the Latin “genus”.
izneo’s European foundation is evident at other places as well. They call books/volumes “albums”, which in the US almost always refers to photo collections and memorials. When looking at a full series (or, as they call it, “serie”), the dollar sign moves to the end with the period in a price replaced with a comma. And the top series is labeled as “Top Des Lectures”.
The FAQ is out of date, with most questions not having been updated since 2018. Like here it says no books in their subscription are available in English, but that’s not true.
The manga selection includes titles from Dark Horse, Digital Manga Publishing, Harlequin (Harlequin/softbank), Kodansha Comics, and TOKYOPOP that are available on izneo. Clicking on the manga section can cause a few second delay as the various sections that highlights titles (new, shojo, etc.) load. The loading circle also happened when I clicked on the “see all” button for those sections, and I had to hit refresh after 15+ seconds of no data.
I won’t post a picture of it, but they do a horrible job of hiding the adult content. The covers are darkened with an 18+ stamp on it, but you can still see everything. Everything, and this is on the main manga page! These should be better hidden so that users have to click to confirm they’re 18+ before seeing this stuff. It’s at the bottom of the page, but the last three sections are Kids, Erotic, and then Adults. Umm…yeah, not smart organizing there. That’s just asking for trouble.
Books or series marked with “Premium” are free to read with a subscription, or you can click the Subscriber Area at the top of the page to browse the Premium titles. Most of the manga I saw available to read for free were Harlequin adaptations or from Kodansha Comics. This included series like Ace of the Diamond, Attack on Titan, Missions of Love, and Mysterious Girlfriend X. This does not include the entire series but only the first few volumes — sometimes about a quarter of the way through all the way up to about three-fourths of the series.
All the Kodansha Comics manga I saw are also available through Kindle Unlimited and ComiXology Unlimited. Of course, the Amazon-owned Kindle/ComiXology’s ComiXology Originals manga titles like BECK and MARS are not available at izneo but do become available elsewhere after a period of exclusivity. As for the Harlequin titles, some older Harlequin manga are available as a part of Kindle and ComiXology Unlimited, but none seemed to overlap with izneo’s larger free-with-subscription Harlequin manga selection. I realized later many are izneo exclusives, so that’s something fans may want to keep in mind.
I first tested izneo on my laptop. Clicking on a volume will send you to their reader. By default, it shows you a single page. And it was going to the next page that I was pretty sure izneo was not going to be for me: you have to hit the right arrow key to go to the next page. “Oh, Krystallina, that’s ridiculous! You’re going to cross off a service because of pressing right instead of left?” Well, it’s because I knew there were going to be another major problem, namely two-page spreads:
Yuck.
Yes, you can make some adjustments to the reader — in fact, more than a lot of its competitors. You can scroll vertically like on a phone or tablet, and you can change the speed and type of the page transitions and the color of the background. But two-page spreads like this are just plain too confusing. You have to start on the left hand side, read from right to left, then jump to the right hand side to go back to reading right to left. However, not every title had this issue; for example, My Little Monster had a similar problem, but Ace of the Diamond didn’t. I’m guessing maybe it has to do with how long the digital versions have been out? Newer releases are fine but older copies are not?
The reader doesn’t seem to load any further than the next page. Even though I had left the tab for a while, if I flipped pages too fast (which would be easily done on pages with minimal text), I could be waiting for several seconds for the next pages to load. Even switching between 1- and 2-page mode required a delay that I wasn’t expecting. It’s not platform-breaking, but compared to other readers, I wasn’t too impressed. I also am used to hitting F11 to go full screen in most readers, but that doesn’t work here, and neither does double clicking to zoom in. You have to use their buttons. I did like how the reader showed me exactly how far I was along in the toolbar. It shows both the percent and the page number out of the total.
I also found out later that some of the exclusives are marked as full color. Clicking on them I was surprised they were in webtoon format, vertical comics. But the reader still forces a page format, so readers must deal with awkward cuts in art and text. And some pages may end up blank because of the spacing between panels.
But maybe izneo does better on my iPad. I downloaded it, and I have to say I liked the homescreen better than on my computer. The website felt like it was too big, the carousel taking up too much of the screen. On my iPad, I could actually see more at one time. Less “HEY TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT WE HAVE!!!” and more “Hey take a look at what we have!”.
So, time to crack open a manga.
“Ooh, it tells me to go from right to left! Maybe the app is better! Two-page spreads will surely be fixed!”
*rotates iPad*
Okay, so you have to force it to the two-page option in order to get what should be the default, the full page at once. And then it becomes like some other readers in which it always forces two pages to be shown at once even though in a physical book it will always open with a single page. This leads to awkwardness like this.
The loading is about the same as the website. But here’s something really nice: I went ahead to page 9-10 on my iPad, and even with it open, I went to the website and clicked on the same book I was reading (The Wilder Wedding volume 1). The online reader immediately opened to page 9. So all the loading must be syncing. That is really nice, especially for those who may want to read on their phone during a break and then come home to read on their computer or tablet. I guess that’s one of the advantages when you don’t have to wait to download a title to your device, since it was very snappy. As soon as the page loaded in my iPad, the website would sync and open that page the next time I jumped in.
Unfortunately, the opposite was not as nice. I would get a “Would you like to resume your reading?” message every time I reopened the book, and, even more annoyingly, it would go back to the half single-page view instead of staying with the two-page view I had chosen. Irritating.
One convenient aspect of the app is that you can buy volumes directly in the app. Unlike a lot of other services where you are forced to go on the website to complete your purchase, you can just continue buying and reading all in one place.
Finally, I decided to try reading manga on a device I never have before: my Switch.
Oddly enough, the Switch version says to log in with your email, the others just say username. Username does work, but it confused me for a moment.
The Switch app requires using the analog sticks or the buttons; you cannot use the touch screen except to type in your search. Right away, that was very annoying. Also annoying is that when I jumped to the Premium section, unlike the other two versions, there was no option to sort through the titles. All 2,400 were just mixed in a list. Even the book sections aren’t really sections; you can click on Manga or whatever in the main menu (accessed with the B button), and it brings up the various genres you can read (Action/Adventure, Adaptation, Fantasy, etc.). Also, as you can see, some were missing their header.
I decided to go back to The Wilder Wedding volume 1 just to see if it would still sync. There was also another reason: unlike on the website or iOS, Premium titles aren’t clearly marked with a banner or otherwise as free to read. It said to download, but the price was still visible. I had to check out how non-Premium books were shown in order to make sure I wasn’t charged. It doesn’t help that the Premium section is so disorganized that I had to scroll quite a ways to see a manga.
It took about 10 minutes to download the volume. It did sync, and the app defaulted to a two-page view. As I expected, the options are severely limited…as in, there are none. You can zoom in with A, turn the pages with by going up/down with the stick or directional buttons, and there’s a shortcut to go back to the beginning (X). That’s it.
And yes, you can read manga on your TV. The spreads looked gorgeous. The text I could read with some effort, but it required some squinting and context clues. Maybe if you had a bigger setup it would be more comfortable, but I probably still would not recommend it. First picture I took about halfway to my TV, the second sitting about 6 feet away.
So what do I think overall? First of all, manga readers will feel the sting of no Seven Seas and Yen Press manga, but VIZ Media’s catalog is probably the biggest gap. The lack of new and old shounen favorites like One Piece, Naruto, Spy x Family as well as all their other non-Jump-related imprints means that most manga fans will still be needing to go somewhere to read manga until if and when more publishers sign on.
If you like other comics and graphic novels, then izneo becomes more interesting. Like the Kodansha Comics Amazon/izneo overlap, some other publishers have titles available on both all-you-can-read subscription programs, but there are plenty of US and European reads you can’t on Kindle Unlimited or ComiXology Unlimited. $7.99 a month is also not outrageous considering the prices on some digital titles even on sale are $4-6, and I could see a lot of the more humor-driven series (like old Archie comics) being a one-and-done read anyway.
At the same time, for a family, Kindle Unlimited’s $9.99 a month gives readers a lot more genres including novels, picture books, and much more. For a family, that could be a much better value since it covers a range of genres. Alternatively, ComiXology Unlimited undercuts izneo at only $5.99 a month, and thanks to the Kodansha Comics exclusives, allows readers to get some full, complete manga series (or up to their latest English volum). Those ComiXology Originals are also available with Amazon Prime.
Of course, no one can beat the Shonen Jump $1.99 a month subscription plan. It could be used in conjunction with izneo to at least fill a little of its manga gap.
One thing that seemed to be lacking on all versions was a recently read section. There’s a library that you are meant to fill as you finish (and rate) books, and you can also add a title by clicking the option under read. But if you start reading and either force close the app or just close the book to check out something else, you have to manually find it again. Things like this could really improve the experience, especially on the more sophisticated (and popular) desktop and Android/iOS apps.
Otherwise, I found the service — at least for manga — underwhelming because it’s simply not optimized for them. Even if most manga are okay in regards to the two-page spreads, the fact that on my iPad I still had to choose the format I wanted to read in was bothersome. Turning from portrait to landscape mode shouldn’t default to a zoomed-in image. The Switch version is okay if, for some reason, you really don’t have any other devices. But I highly doubt there are many people into manga (or anime, where a lot of people first get into this fandom) that don’t have a smartphone or cheap tablet.
I do recommend checking out excerpts before buying so that you at least know if the volumes are formatted with the extra page to make the two-page spreads are lined up correctly. Being able to buy directly on the platform is nice, but it doesn’t do a lot of good if a common reading style is off balance. Perhaps I just got unlucky and chose unoptimized titles to browse, but it’s still a risk without checking in advance and a huge reason for my lackluster enthusiasm for izneo. The fact I already have been able to read the Kodansha Comics’ Premium offerings before might have been a factor since I am more familiar with the Kindle reader’s quirks, but at least I can rotate my iPad and continue reading without any visual interruptions!
Have you checked out izneo? What did you think? What titles on there are worth subscribing for?
Access to the service was provided by izneo.