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The story
A string of outages has hit e-comic services, leaving readers unable to access titles they’d already purchased. The thread calls out Comic Shomoa and Renta by name, with Shomoa reportedly having “no estimated time for recovery yet.” It also came out that Shomoa had revised its terms of service right before going into maintenance, drawing cries of “that’s awful” from users. Meanwhile DLsite and Kindle reportedly came through unscathed, sparking a mix of “the biggest platforms are the safe bet” and “if even Kindle isn’t safe, nothing is.” Some pointed out the deeper issue: e-books are really just a rental in disguise.
What people said
are there any besides Shomoa and Renta that are actually down too?
Just an affiliate-bait thread (dismissing it as clickbait for ad-revenue blogs)
There are too many barriers to putting out physical manga volumes.
It costs money, and Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kodansha have a stranglehold on the manga market (differences in bookstore marketing, stock levels, etc).
Isn't there any new publisher coming up to challenge that?
I want to believe that, but Kadokawa's publicly listed, so…
worried some nasty activist investor might come after it.
Kadokawa's already screwed up once before, though
At times like this the biggest player does feel safer.
Not that it's guaranteed to be fine, though.
If Kindle's not okay, nothing's okay.
Sounds like a blast if a place like that leaks your purchase history along with your personal info (sarcastic)
Shomoa revised its terms of service right before going into this maintenance — that's rough.
PlayStation seems like it could be next
Whether it gets hacked and goes down, or the business can't sustain itself and the service shuts down, either way what you bought stops working.
Amazon runs it all.
They're all built the same way under the hood, though.
Get hacked and you won't be able to read anything either.
In the end we learned the biggest players are the safest bet.
That place is under the GEO Group umbrella, though — isn't that a bit risky?
That's basically outing your own identity, lol (joke about adult-content purchase history leaking)
I'd recommend buying Kadokawa titles through au's Book Pass and linking your bookshelf with Kadokawa's BOOKWALKER
Though then again, Kadokawa already got hit by an attack and screwed up before…
It's no joke that Comipo (which has long stockpiled adult titles) or Yahoo's eBook service are actually more convenient to use.
I read that as 'how easy it is to use' and went 'huh?!' — oh wait, it says 'how hard it is to use'!
Even several terabytes of data you painstakingly scanned yourself (DIY book-scanning, aka "jisui") can vanish just like that.
Not even backing up your collection data isn't fearless, it's just plain stupid
On top of that, the same titles are scattered everywhere, and some publishers even run multiple apps of their own.
I'm not saying merge Jump and Magazine into one app, but come on, do something about this.
If you don't spread things across services, though, you're done for in one shot when something like this happens
since they run commercials nonstop, I guess that means they're popular?
I used Shomoa specifically because, being an NTT service, it seemed like one that wouldn't ever pull out of the market
So this really stings
The rights holders are all the same anyway, so you should be able to read it anywhere no matter where you bought it
That's way too idealistic
Background and key points of this discussion
Strictly speaking, buying an e-book isn’t really “purchasing data” so much as “renting the right to read it,” and the risk that purchased titles become unreadable when a service suffers an outage or shuts down has been flagged for some time. The thread’s reference to “Kadokawa already screwed up before” appears to point to the 2024 incident in which the KADOKAWA Group was hit by a cyberattack that knocked out BOOKWALKER and other services for an extended period. Many users had relied on Comic Shomoa precisely because it’s run under the NTT Group (operated by NTT Solmare) and felt reassuring — this outage shook that assumption. The thread saw praise for publisher-run official apps and independent stores, along with calls to consolidate the glut of competing manga apps, while the suggestion that “since the rights holders are the same, purchased data should be readable through any store” drew pushback as “too idealistic,” leaving the debate unresolved. It’s also worth noting that no industry-wide framework currently guarantees readers’ continued access to content they’ve already bought, which means outages like this remain a structural problem that could easily recur.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Bad News] Multiple E-Comic Services Go Down, Purchased Books Unreadable, Becomes a Hot Topic.”
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