Which Manhwa Reading Sites Offer Offline Download Options?

The whole Tachiyomi ecosystem was created to fill a very specific technical need, namely the demand for a unified, offline-capable reading experience for manhwa and other comics. As a result, the many, very detailed tutorials on the best sources for manhwa can be found in the many forums. A number of Discord servers even exist to help set up Tachiyomi for people. Because the official and unofficial websites for comics were so very fragmented and online, the community ended up creating their own ideal solution to read their comics, because the existing platforms didn’t even begin to meet this very persistent need.

Since I often travel for long periods of time, reading all volumes of a manga on my trip, I am very concerned with how mobile services handle offline caching for reading manga on mobile devices. ‘WEBTOON’ from Naver, ‘Lezhin Comics’, ‘Tappytoon’, ‘Tapas’, ‘Piccoma’/‘KakaoPage’ from Kakao, ‘Manta’ from Lines, ‘INKR’ from Psyonic and ‘ComiXology’ from Amazon support offline reading of chapters, mostly after purchase or with subscription. Note that downloaded chapters are locked to the mobile app and are DRM-protected so you cannot download chapters as loose files that you can then move to wherever you like. Also, offline reading is limited by regional licensing terms, and usually it is enabled for paid content only. I’m willing to sacrifice wanting to own files of manga and to have them not be locked to a service in order to have a large library of chapters that are ready to read on my trips. In order to make sure that I have enough manga to read on my trip, I download chapters the day before I leave. That way I won’t be stuck with no manga to read because the service is slow to load on my phone due to being on the train with poor internet connection.

Another reason I don’t like to be away from the internet for too long is because I like to have the ability to save chapters to my device to read later. This is possible with many of the platforms listed above by downloading their apps and reading comics offline through them. WEBTOON, for example, has an official app for downloading episodes to read offline later. Lezhin Comics, Tappytoon, Tapas and many more have similar ways to download purchased chapters and read them offline. Piccoma (as Piccoma and KakaoPage as its international version) also supports downloading episodes to read offline as well, but episodes may not be downloadable in all regions due to licensing restrictions.

Downloads are handled within the app itself, usually cached to your device for offline reading. This typically means that instead of saving a physical copy of the comic (a CBZ/ZIP file) to your device to read later, each episode is saved to your app’s offline library instead. Because of the way comics are distributed digitally these days, many of the community-created sites and third-party apps allow users to save individual chapters for offline reading as well. However, these are usually against the terms of service of the sites/comics in question and can pose various security and even legal risks to users. Also worth noting is that even if you download an episode on one of your devices, in some cases (depending on how the comic in question is licensed) it may not be available for download on others (for example: while comics on Piccoma can be downloaded for offline reading in Japan and Korea, users in other regions may not be able to download the same comics even if they are available to read online).

So basically, you download chapters via the app’s official save chapters functionality, be it for purchase, membership or to unlock a free chapter. That saves it to the app’s offline library on your device where you can read it at your leisure. For long trips abroad I load up the app with an extra 10-20 chapters or so as a precaution, but basically that’s all you need to read comics on the go without an internet connection. Smart.