One way to imagine a library of webtoons is through the form of Tappytoon. The service, available as an app and as a web platform, puts up a wide variety of webcomics to read in the vertical format they were originally written and designed to be read. You download the app and start to browse by genre. Most titles post a first ‘free’ chapter to introduce readers to the work, and then it’s coins for more – the service’s in-app currency that you can buy with real cash or earn over time through rewards. Tappytoon also offers a growing slate of original titles, including The Duchess’ 50 Tea Recipes, which is addictively great. With a clean app, accurate translations, and a deep library that gets updated regularly, this is a reading destination for people who love nothing more than getting lost in a series of panels.
I wanted to give a quick shout out to Reddit, which is an underappreciated resource for finding free legal manga to read. Typically when there’s a free promotion by a publisher, someone in the r/manga community will post about it. The r/FreeEBOOKS community frequently has manga volumes listed as they become free on Amazon for a brief time. It’s all community-driven discovery, and often I find great new series simply because someone happened to post a notice that, for instance, Kodansha made xxx free for the weekend. The community is also good at blacklisting scam sites and recommending the best aggregators for manga that are not available through legal channels. This is a useful resource to have, in addition to just searching for free manga online.