Novelous Series Rankings (February 2025)

On January 23^rd, 2025, Shogakukan released it’s new light novel reading app in the United States and Canada for their English readers called “Novelous.” While primarily a light novel based reading app, there is a collection of manga titles that were previously licensed and released on other services that was included in the app. Notably for the light novel releases in the app, they are released as “AI-assisted” English translations. Previous reports by Nikkei via Anime News Network also noted that using Mantra’s AI-assisted translation system is to reduce costs. These translations may have some amount of humans providing the translations, but none are credited with translation on the app. With the current manga series on the app were previously translated using real translators and letterers.

With the original press release, the goal of the app is to have 1 million users by the end of the fiscal year. This then further projects to having several billions of yen in revenue via payments for purchasing the light novel and manga chapters.

As the app has been live for over 2 weeks, were doing a check-in to see how close to those goals the app has reached.

Within the app there is a “views” or “reads” counter for each series. This counter appears to combine the total number of views all of the chapters for all users on the service. When you reach the end of a chapter this number will increase. It does not count the view/reads if you start a preview on the website. There can be up to a 2-hour delay before these view counters are updated.

Within app there is also a “Ranking” which lists the light novels and manga by daily, weekly, and monthly periods. Doing a test of these numbers, a series on the “daily” ranking for manga could jump up considerably with even just a single person reading a handful of chapters. This help points to an overall very low view count for any of these series.

Knowing the exact number of downloads for the app to find out the actual reader usage is not information that is publicly available. Some services provide some estimates, but the best estimate is looking at the Google Play store’s list of downloads. As of February 8^th, 2025, the app is currently listed as only have 100s of downloads (under 1000) on Google Play. The app is also available on Apple devices which isn’t included in these numbers.

For comparison, the Azuki manga app has over 100,000 downloads (released June 2021), KManga app has over 1 million downloads (released May 2023), and the Shonen Jump app has over 1 million downloads (released August 2013) on the Google Play store. The Manga Plus app has over 10 million downloads (January 2019) and also features a number ranking for the views/read count. The recently released The Marshall King manga by author Boichi, currently has 102,622 views across multiple languages for just 2 days of being published

Based on all of the above, it appears that this view/read counter for the Novelous app is accurate and the amount of total readership for the app is extremely low compared to other manga-based apps. The focus of this app is primarily with light novels, a planned writing contest with My Anime List (MAL), could potentially spur some new interest in the app.

Included below is a list of all the light novels and manga available on the Novelous app as of February 8^th. The view/read counter as of February 7^th is included as a snapshot in time for the popularity of these titles.