Mar 28, 2026
Greetings!
This is Sam Pinansky, CEO of M12 Media (formerly JNC), and I hope you all are enjoying the new Bookwalker site and app that we just released.
I thought I’d take the time to go into more detail about this project and talk about some of the thinking that went into the redesign, what made it for the launch, what’s coming up soon in further updates, and some of the challenges we faced on this pretty big project.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been around the anime/manga industry for quite some time now, and I’d call this my 3rd big “project” that I was in charge of. The first was something called “Anime Sols”, which was a Kickstarter-like concept (before Kickstarter was a thing) for classic anime. It didn’t really succeed, but it taught me a lot about… how to deal with Japanese companies, heh.
Next up was J-Novel Club itself, which was nearly a solo project for me when I launched it. (You could tell because of the really crappy design).
This project, the complete recreation of Bookwalker Global, was of an entirely different scale, and posed a ton of challenges that the others didn’t have, the biggest one being that this was an active service with over 250,000 user accounts and nearly 8 million books in people’s libraries, with a catalog of over 100,000 titles including novels, manga, and audiobooks!
No other specialty store of our relatively small scale handles all of this, so making sure we could deliver an experience that was as close to the original store as possible, but still modern and giving us room to grow was crucial in our planning.
In order to hit the time and budget requirements, we utilized a lot of open-source and open spec systems: our reader is based off the Readium epub reader, which means it’s very compatible with the entirety of the epub standard which is crucial for our catalog that has epubs from 10 years and over 100 publishers.
Some of the reader features on the web are still in development, like vertical scrolling mode, and coming soon a proper web audiobook player! Other smaller things will likely be updated constantly. Currently, the best reading experience is actually on our app reader, so check that out!
So many things to migrate: One thing that didn’t make the launch but we are working on is your reading progress. You’d think this would be easy? Well, no. It turns out that your reading progress wasn’t stored as some normal percent, but rather a link to a file in the epub itself and then an index in that file… That’s just not how our new reader tracks progress at all, sigh. So, we’re in the process of programming a conversion script that decompiles every epub, figures out approximately what percentage of the book that part of the xhtml in that particular file is in the book by literally rendering the epub on the server, calculating the percent (or page, for manga), and restoring everything. So we’ll have an option for everyone to import their reading history pretty soon. Not all problems are so easy to solve.
Overall we wanted to make things smooth and less cluttered, while still allowing deeper searching. The search and filter process is a lot more streamlined. Instead of being based on “products” (volumes or chapters), we’re focusing on “series”, or content to be more precise, because ultimately people are looking for something to read, not something to buy.
One of the challenges we faced with this is that the tagging system from the old site was… well let’s just say that when you combine tags from 100 different publishers you end up with a lot of things that don’t mesh well. This is still a work in progress, but we’ve partnered with a community based tagging site, MangaBaka, to import (and at a later date, sync) tag information about series that should be much more consistent across books!
There’s still like 1000 series where this linkage needs to be manually updated, and there’s some differences in the way genres and tags are mapped which we’ll be working through over time.
Good tagging is a never ending struggle…
One really important thing in the new system is a complete overhaul of the promotions system. Up until now sales have been really traditional, focused on a large group of books with certain coin back or discounts, and the occasional bonus item.
Our new promotion system can handle these kinds of promotions, but also so many more. It’s a little different, because before you can get a discount you’ll need to “activate” the deal, where it’ll show up in your deals menu. For normal sales this should happen the next time you visit the app or website automatically. But for other kinds of promotions, it might only happen for some users: we can set a number of different criteria, so who knows what kind of promotions might pop up! For example, right now we have a special 25% off your next purchase coupon, but only for user accounts that are less than 7 days old.
We could set up a deal that only triggers for users that own over 100 books with the “yuri tag”, or a promotion that only triggers if you’ve spent more than XXX coins in the last week, etc. It’s way too flexible and our marketing staff is paralyzed with all the possibilities…
A note about bonus items: One thing that isn’t in the new site is the bookshelf feature. More on that later, but your bonus skins that you might you can still download (see the email we sent you when we migrated your account). But other bonus items that came with some books in our catalog are currently not available to buy. That’s something we’re working on, and those bonus stories etc will be back and automatically added when you add the primary product to your cart in a week or two (there are around ~20-30 of these).
In the effort to make things simpler, they will be listed separately from the volumes and chapters, in their own “bonus” tab, so stay tuned for when we roll those out.
Of course, for those of you who already own them, they are there in your purchased library to read.
Speaking of the library, we know that there’s some of you with a very, very large amount of books. The current library allows you to easily filter by tag or publisher or author, or by keyword search, but there’s a lot of improvements we are already working on! Coming soon will be a new series based display for your purchased library which collates all your books by series.
This is actually the highest priority of our ongoing features we’re developing and already fully designed, so hopefully we can launch it very soon.
In the meantime, we will also be launching our OPDS compatibility, which will allow you to easily access all of your purchased books in a variety of third-party apps that support OPDS & LCP. Basically, this means you’ll be able to use apps like FBReader, Thorium, Pocketbook (and in the near future, e-ink readers from Kobo and co.) to search, organize and download your books for offline reading. You can already download the LCP license file from our web reader today, but with OPDS, access to large libraries of books will be easier than ever!
In addition, we’re working on a replacement for the bookshelf feature I like to call My Collections. You will be able to create your own “collections” like you’ll see on the main website for your library, and easily add and remove books from these collections as you see fit. That way, if you want to create your own “read” collection, etc, that’ll be an easy way for you to sort and keep track of your growing library.
Also, we’ll bring back wishlist sharing in a new form, Collection Sharing! This way you can have multiple different collections to share with people, and not be limited to a single wishlist.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about “favorites”! You might have noticed that these definitely work differently than the wishlist and “favorite” from the old site. Rather than the Amazon-esque wishlist of things you want to buy, it’s focused on your favorite series. Right now it functions mostly as a shortcut to find the series page for the series you’re reading at the moment, or that you often buy, but we’ll be implementing things like notifications when series go on sale and other handy features moving forward. That way, also, it’ll be less work to manage your favorites since you won’t have to constantly wishlist new volumes, etc.
The site migration itself definitely took some more time than we anticipated, and we had to emergency switch transactional email providers after our original one decided to block us from sending emails due to suspicious activity. We took a little longer to migrate audiobooks than we’d like, and we had a bug with reading books from your libraries that are no longer for sale, but as of about 12 hours later everything is fixed and working smoothly! fingers crossed
One other thing we’re working on that I think people will be glad to hear: offline reading mode for the app! We just didn’t get this one finished in time for the launch, but it’s like 80% complete and should be available in 2-3 app updates. Here’s a hint though: Audiobooks are fully downloaded and cached, so if you’re going on a flight just open up one of those 6-7 hour long listens and you’re good to go in the air.
Hopefully everyone is migrating their old accounts without issue, but we do have a number of people with some problems where they accidentally created a new account with the same email: We’re working through the support emails to make sure everyone is migrated properly!
And we are definitely monitoring your feedback carefully. There are some things that are just the nature of the change in design and business philosophy (like preorders being purchases instead of reservations; autobuy not creating a transaction without user compliant interaction; a de-emphasis on “prices” in the interface and an emphasis on “read”, etc), but there’s a lot of small improvements we’ll continue to work on, especially when it comes to search and discoverability, and we’re open to everyone’s thoughts about how to make the site better for everyone! The ultimate goal of this re-build is to enable us to be more responsive to the needs of our audience, after all. Without this change, BookWalker Global would likely not be able to survive, so we’re glad to be given the opportunity to build something that really serves the English-speaking manga and novel community.
Samuel Pinansky (aka Quarkboy)
