Reviews for BOOK WALKER - Manga & Novels

They appear to have started playing favorites with genres/demographics in their sales. For example, in the past 2 months: -BL enjoyers got a 30% off sale -TL/Smut enjoyers got 30% off and 25% coupon -Ecchi enjoyers only got 20%/25% points back (no sale) If you like ecchi then your only hope is that it will be included in a different type of sale. They also removed the "Find Them Here" page that listed series other stores dropped, mostly ecchi. Seems they no longer care about my demographic.

UPDATE: Customer service fixed my issue. It was unexpectedly very quick. From this experience, I highly recommend reaching out to them if you are having issues. Keep getting "Unexpected error. Please try again later." when trying to listen to my most recently purchased audio book Edit: Email sent

The e-books read pretty well, and the selection for Japanese books is great. But accessing the Japanese store is a hassle. I have to search for gibberish in Japanese first (so something like はやほやるそとふんゆ) so it can say it couldn't find anything in the English store and suggest trying the Japanese store, then search for the thing I'm actually looking for. On some pages there's a globe button to change the language which is what I want to do, but that button is not accessible from the shop page.

Review prompted by recent app redesign. I like the improved speed, but there is much more white space now. I used to be able to fit 15 or more books on my screen when viewing my list (library, as it is now called). I really liked that, since I have smaller phone. Now i can fit 6, maybe 9 books at once on my screen. Disappointed, hope they add some customizable menus and resizing options to accomodate smaller decices.

This is the most strict DRM I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Because I am running a custom ROM, the app refuses to start. Same with any sort of root on your device. Thus, I cannot access the books I *legally purchased* on my phone because I am assumed to be a thief. Reading on a desktop browser constantly logs me out of the site because my "session expired," so reading there is frustrating as well. I was lured by an admittedly good deal, but I regret my purchase. Book Walker conveniently offers no form of refund either. Buyer beware.

I was very happy with the app until it suddenly decided to tell me it would be tracking me across all other apps for marketing reasons with no clear way to reject permissions. This is super creepy. I'll be deleting the app soon, and you can bet I'll stop using the website, too, since this is how they treat their customers. Edit: You should still not be tracking me across apps. Options were "allow" and "ask not to track", which is legally distinct from a "no".

This app drains a ton of battery even when it is not actively being used. Everything takes forever to load unless you turn off any data connection on your device then it all loads instantly like it should. Why does my virtual bookshelf have a limit on how many books it can hold? It's just a folder on a computer let me fit an entire series on one shelf.

It's great for manga, and when Amazon pulled some light novels I had purchased from their library I was able to rebuy them here. My sole complaint is that there's no option for endless scrolling when reading books. I don't like flipping pages when reading on my phone, and it wouldn't hurt anything to have scrolling as an option for those of us that prefer it.

The pricing and service is great amd the reader works great. HOWEVER the app is absolutely abysmal, the lag is obnoxious, it reloads for 5 seconds or so every time you tab back into the app. Worst of all, the audiobook player is painfully bad, there is no controls outside of the app so if you want to pause you have to open your phone, open the app, wait for it to load, than press the pause.

I can read books, offline, and there seems to be basic integration with Google Translate. Other than this the app is slow and restricts anything else you might want to do with the book (want to copy a few kanji to look up the meaning? too bad!) and more importantly unlike Amazon there's absolutely no way to get the book somewhere else that's more pleasant to read, such as an e-ink reader. I'll probably only use this for books that I can only read on Bookwalker, which thankfully are not many!

Update:I somehow worked out some of the download issues through a a hard reinstall. The app remains a shadow of it former self due to the change of interface. It is nicer to be able to put as many books as you want in one shelf, but the display is blander. A lot of promotional pictures and backgrounds were given out in the past, I used to have them as backgrounds for the shelves. Now they must be awkwardly cropped to use as none of them match the new format. Performance is inconsistent too.

I was looking for an alternative to Amazon since they've been removing a lot of LNs and manga. Book Walker seems like the safest option as I wouldn't be surprised if Google and Apple follow Amazon's lead soon, but the UI for the app is total trash. It's nearly impossible to navigate it without confusion, the settings are confusing, and they keep the subscription tab despite it being exclusive to japanese titles. I'd like to recommend it and use it myself, yet as it currently stands I can't.

I read manga for two reasons. Entertainment and education. For the second, I like to be able to read in original Japanese. There is no filter option for languages on bookwalker. Even switching my account language to Japanese (at least, I assume that's what that was, there was no context to that option) only changed my account settings page and nothing else. It is surprisingly difficult to find untranslated, original Japanese manga available anywhere. I was hoping bookwalker would help. It didn't

I like the idea of the app & its super cool that it has a bunch of Mangas & light novels. My complaint is that when you use the mobile version, reading certain mangas & novels are hard because the panels don't load quick enough. I'm still gonna be using the app but maybe not on my phone. I hope you can fix it to where the pages don't take a long time loading when someone is trying to read

I like the app, more like I like the service. It quite struggling with the app at first but after few updates it become better. Not only that, I can read manga/ln in legal way and reread whenever I want. There are ton of free manga on internet but I want to contribute something to the author as well as the artist that works with them. And I want more bookshelf skin! But make it easier to get.

Good app, but seems to be missing fairly popular titles like My Dress-Up Darling, for example. I went through the process of e-books requests some time ago for Global/EN but no dice on it appearing in the store yet, even though it's accessible on the JP side. That and others show a clear catalogue difference between Global and JP - I do hope this is remedied in the near future for it would be a boon for both BW and us customers. Other than that, I have no complaints with the app to date.

Plenty of sales & points are a godsend to get free volumes/chapters. The prices are equivalent or better than Amazon. If there's a problem with a title & you let them know about it, the problem is promptly fixed in a few days with a note thanking you for telling them about it. Release dates for titles are listed up to 3 months ahead. The only thing I'm not liking is that not all manga publishers are on this site, but that's other company distribution rights, unfortunately. Need more phone space!

4 star for their store and image quality. They have a fairly large selection and the image quality is much nicer than say Amazon 0 star for DRM ebooks. Their ereader is not the best, which is fine. Let us use other ereaders then. I don't mind switching apps when I'm shopping. But having all my books be readable in one place is a must. I regret having ever bought books from them, as I have sense repurchased them just to get rid of the DRM problem.

PRELIMINARY REVIEW: 3-stars At this time, I have found a couple of issues with the app. And it's not limited to Android either, as the issue also affects iOS version. That issue is how it handles numbered bullet lists. On Android, the numbers are cut off at the edge. On iOS, they are completely cut off. In addition to the aforementioned, margin is probably a compounding issue with the aforementioned. They are too thin on both platforms. I am also a bit skeptic on how text formatting is handled but I cannot compare it since I do not own the same title on another e-reading platform. I want to continue using this app. But the aforementioned issues are holding me back from completely abandoning Amazon's Kindle platform. If the devs (or is it the publishers?) can get these issues fixed, I'm leaving it with 3 stars for now.

Even more issues. Can't download/read properly on some devices anymore due to "isn't responding" issues since a previous update if I have more than maybe 30 downloaded. And yes, I had already tried to update to latest version (at the time). That is what broke things. Haven't used this to read in months now with no fix in sight. Power outages specifically cause your login credentials to expire, so you can't read since you can't auth. Best to stay in airplane mode except when downloading.