LINE escalated e-comics business in Taiwan

LINE released e-comics service for mobile LINE Manga in Taiwan. This is the first overseas development of their e-comics service.

LINE Manga is the e-comics service released in April, 2013 that can read various comics and novels with smartphones and tablets. LINE cooperates with more than 100 publishing companies and contributes more than 100,000 books. The application passes 11 million downloading and grows up to the hugest e-book service in Japan.

Japanese contents are very popular in Asia, but yet a lot of bad bootleg circulate because the overseas advance of Japanese companies is poor. LINE performed a capital tie-up with Japanese main publication companies Kodansya(講談社), Shogakukan(小学館), and Media-Do(メディアドゥ) in October 2014, and established joint venture LINE Book Distribution to improve such situation. In the beginning, yhey release Taiwanese version of 1200 e-mangas. Some popular mangas become free every day in rotation. Furthermore, they present special LINE stickers of mangas to users who downloaded that mangas.