Weekly Shonen Jump falls under a million, and our reading list barely meets our watch list

Anime News Network reports that Weekly Shonen Jump's print circulation has dropped under one million copies, the first time it has done so. The same report attributes to the Japan Magazine Publishers Association the statement that no magazine in Japan now stands above one million in circulation.

AnimeSphere keeps a reading page as well as a watching one, so the useful thing we can add today is a plain account of what ours offers and how little of it we can also show.

What the reading page lists

The page at animesphere.app/read returned HTTP 200 when we fetched it today. Its own description says it points readers toward manga that is free to read on official sources. It names 12 series: One Piece, Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy x Family, My Hero Academia, Sakamoto Days, Kaiju No. 8, Dandadan, Blue Box, Mashle, Undead Unluck and Akane-banashi.

We host no manga ourselves. Every free reading path on that page is a link out to the rights holder's own site.

How little of it we can also show

Each of those 12 series was matched to its anime entry in our index, and every one of those pages was fetched today. All returned HTTP 200.

Two of the 12 state any free episode at all. Jujutsu Kaisen states one. Akane-banashi states 12. The other ten state none. That is the shape of the overlap: a reading list of twelve, and two of those twelve stating any free episode on our pages, one of them a single episode.

The one title with a complete free run

Our index records 12 episodes for Akane-banashi, and its live page states 12 free episodes, so the free run covers the whole of what we record. All 12 were checked against their uploads today. Twelve resolved, with no fetch failures, twelve distinct episode identities, no duplicates, and no case of one video filed against two episodes. The upload titles run from Episode 1 through Episode 12 and match the numbers we store exactly.

The channel is called Akane-banashi Global. It does not carry a YouTube verified badge.

Episodes 1 and 12 were opened today. They run 1,490 and 1,487 seconds against a recorded episode length of 25 minutes, and each reports only an automatic Japanese caption track, so the audio is Japanese. Frames pulled from episodes 1 and 6 show English dialogue subtitles burned into the picture. This is Japanese audio with English subtitles in the image, and it is not a dub. The country allow-list on all 12 rows includes the United States.

So Akane-banashi can be read free through an official source and watched here across all 12 episodes our index records. Ten of the twelve offer no free episodes on our pages, and one offers a single episode. We would rather print that number than round it up.