Recently, we had the chance to interview Samuel Pinansky, the founder of both BOOK☆WALKER GLOBAL and J-Novel Club. The former recently went through a relaunch and is now titled BookWalker. The relaunch features a redesigned website and mobile apps, Lightweight Content Protection (LCP) DRM, and an expanded catalog of manga and light novels. Our interview dives deep into the reasons for the relaunch, the implications of LCP, his work with J-Novel Club, and more.
We hope you enjoy this exclusive interview, and we’d like to thank Samuel Pinansky and his team for making this possible! Enjoy!
At what moment in time did you realize that the old BOOK☆WALKER GLOBAL experience needed a fundamental overhaul?
Samuel Pinansky (Sam): It was more than just the website/app experience that was part of the decision-making process to overhaul Bookwalker Global; it was combined with shifting the business management itself outside of Japan to better react to a global audience. Those discussions have been ongoing for almost 5 years.
One of the promises to readers is that they can escape the “walled garden.” It feels like most publishers have spent years building those walls – how did those conversations go with your publishing partners?
Sam: Ultimately this isn’t really something that publishers are upset about: their goal isn’t to prevent readers from reading their content; they just want to protect the works of their creators from being accessed by people who haven’t legally purchased it. As long as we maintain that basic promise to the rights holders, giving the readers more control over how they consume the content is a win-win for everyone.
If LCP takes off, what does that mean practically for someone who’s been buying manga on, say, a competing platform for years? Additionally, what does this mean for the average reader?
Sam: Well, it’s not making the situation any worse than before, when each platform is its own library that can never be portable outside of that one system. What would be really nice is if this becomes really common and consumers can just know that when they buy something digitally, they can organize it, collect it, and collate it irrespective of the store they actually purchased it from, just like physical books. To be fair though, the “average” reader isn’t a collector, but just someone who wants to read the latest chapters of their manga/novel they’ve been into lately. In that case, it doesn’t really matter to them. But for the power users and collectors, I think it gives them a glimmer of hope for a better future of digital manga.
BookWalker is under KADOKAWA, one of the biggest names in the anime and manga industry. How much does that relationship shape what BookWalker can and can’t do?
Sam: M12 Media, the company that runs BookWalker, is a subsidiary of Kadokawa, and we’re managed along with other overseas subsidiaries. Kadokawa’s policy for its overseas companies is to allow them to manage their own businesses however best they can for their local markets, as long as it matches their overall strategic vision.
Expanding the digital readership of manga and light novels overseas is core to Kadokawa’s growth strategy (along with producing anime and games and other media mix projects, and supporting the growth of new IP), so it’s not so much a conversation of what Bookwalker “can’t” do, but rather, do the things we want to do fit into the bigger picture of Kadokawa’s strategy.
Piracy has always been a massive concern in the industry. Does LCP DRM actually move the needle on that, or is this more about legitimate user experience?
Sam: Long-term, the way you “beat” piracy is to provide a better service than the pirates. That has various aspects to it: price, availability, and convenience. LCP addresses the 3rd part of this by making legitimate purchases more convenient and shortening that gap between official stores and pirate sites. To work on the other two is something the industry will need to continue to work on as a whole, and BookWalker is only a part of that.
Manhwa and Webtoons have exploded alongside Manga, especially with more of them getting anime adaptations recently. Is that a threat to BookWalker, a complement, or an opportunity?
Sam: Definitely an opportunity! We already have some manhwa and webtoons on our service, and we will strive to add more and more as we grow our catalog. I think the new generation of manga fans aren’t really just fans of manga anymore, but any graphic novel medium that has the kinds of stories that people enjoy. We’d love to grow our audience that way.
You built J-Novel Club from the ground up as a publisher — now you’re running a distribution platform. How different are those jobs, really? What surprised you most about the transition?
Sam: Good news, I’m still running J-Novel Club too! (Well, not as hands-on as I used to be, but M12 Media also runs J-Novel Club, after all). But seriously, it’s interesting to be on the other side of the coin, as there are different considerations. BookWalker’s role is to be fair in the way we deal with all content and publishers, and work with them to create promotions and to get their books on the store quickly and into the hands of readers.
With J-Novel Club, our biggest concern is with the translation and publishing; it’s a lot more focused on the content itself, and how best to bring that to the audience. At BookWalker, we are mostly just passing along the content from the publishers and helping them succeed.
You mentioned more features coming in 2026 and beyond. Without giving too much away, is there a specific problem you feel the industry has almost completely ignored that BookWalker wants to solve?
Sam: The biggest complaints that I hear from manga fans fall into two categories: availability and pricing. For the first one, people want to be able to read the manga they are looking for, all in one place. That means making sure that BookWalker has all the manga and novels from all the publishers, and the definition of “all” keeps getting wider, whether it’s webtoons or comics from other languages, the fans just want it all in one place.
The second big issue is pricing: we need to make sure that pricing reflects the value consumers place on the product, and whether it’s new business models or deals or other methods, giving readers the chance to read things at a price point that they feel is worth it is crucial. Now, for both availability and pricing, this isn’t something that only BookWalker can solve.
For the former, we have all the issue of the time lag between publication in Japan and an official English release (not to mention all the works that never get an official release)! And for pricing, there’s still a big gap between what the rights holders feel is the right price and what a large chunk of consumers are willing to pay. Hopefully BookWalker can serve as a bridge to help with these issues in the future.
Five years from now, what does a win look like for BookWalker — what’s the version of this story where you look back and say it worked?
Sam: The most important thing is growing our readership and the number of publishers we’re working with, so the key things we’re looking at are who is buying books, how much are they reading books, and just how wide a range of books we can offer on our store. Five years from now, I hope that all of those things will be a lot bigger!
Note: This interview was edited for clarity.
