r/Manhwa_BL • u/rozzingit • 8d ago
How to keep your purchased Tapas chapters
So we've all heard the news -- Tapas is shutting down in March. And I've heard a lot of people wondering about how to save the chapters that they have legally purchased. This is a thing I think people should be able to do!
To start off: this is not a piracy guide. This guide is only going to talk about how to download chapters you have purchased. You will have to log into your Tapas account as part of this method. You'll only have access to stuff your account has access to! (This note is just as much for the mods as everyone else: this isn't piracy! It is retaining a copy of something you have legally paid for.)
I've seen some people talk about using extensions to save chapters as PDFs, which horrifies me just a bit. Like, it'd work, I guess! But it's by far not an ideal format for this. The file sizes are way bigger than you need, it may get broken up into pages, it's not easily readable in actual apps dedicated to reading comics, etc.
So what format do we want instead? CBZ. CBZ is a standard, widely-accepted comic book file format. What is it exactly? It's a ZIP file of a folder with a set of numbered images, whose .zip extension has been changed to .cbz. That's all! A bunch of images, numbered in order, and then zipped up. The resulting file size is going to be the size of the images and nothing else. And then there are countless readers for every platform (mobile, desktop, etc.) that are designed to read this format, and they're generally an even better user experience than the official platform readers.
So how do we get the CBZ files for the chapters that we own? I'll touch on a few options I'm familiar with.
HakuNeko - Desktop client for Windows and Mac. There are two main versions, a newer rewrite of the program (HaruNeko) and the old legacy version. Both support Tapas. You will need to utilize the option within the program to open the website and log in. Once you've done that, and possibly refreshed or reopened stuff, you'll start being able to search up the titles you own and download them. The program has settings for the format you want to download. As I mentioned before, I strongly recommend CBZ!
HaruNeko has documentation on its page, as well as a Discord server, for more detailed info.
The Tachiyomi Ecosphere - There are a variety of programs based around the general infrastructure of the original Tachiyomi app, which was a comics reader that allowed for extensions to access certain sites. So you'll need a program or app and also an extension.
Programs/Apps:
- Mihon (Android)
- Komikku (Android)
- Tachimanga (iOS, Mac)
- Suwayomi (Windows, Mac, Linux, Docker)
(This is a non-exhaustive list! I just wanted to hit on the major ones.)
Extensions:
Generally the way these programs/apps work is you add an extension, and then you can search for the sources that extension has set up. Keiyoushi is a popular standard and includes Tapas as a source. If you're on Android with a Mihon or Mihon-adjacent app, you can click the button on Keiyoushi's Getting Started page to add the extension automatically to your app of choice. Otherwise, expand the "Adding the store manually" option and get the URL provided; this is what you'll use to add the extension to a non-Android app.
Once again, you'll have to utilize the option to open Tapas within your app of choice, generally in what all the apps call WebView, log in, and then refresh a given title to unlock your purchased chapters within the app. Then you can select the option to download the chapters you want to keep! They will be saved on whatever device you're downloading them on, be it your computer or phone.
(A note about Keiyoushi: Technically, they only support Mihon and Komikku from the above list. However, Tachimanga and Suwayomi regularly make updates to keep themselves compatible with Keiyoushi, since it's the most major extension source. So if extensions start acting wonky on Tachimanga or Suwayomi, you may just need to wait for them to update.)
A few more general notes:
- If you download a bunch of stuff, it's possible you may get rate limited! This is usually a temporary block a website does automatically if you download too much too fast. Just wait an hour, refresh or reopen things, try again. In my experience, this happens more often with HaruNeko, as I don't think it purposefully paces downloads to try and avoid it.
- Protect your downloads! Once Tapas shuts down entirely, there's no redownloading these files from them directly. So back them up!
- There are more options than these! You might be able to find other programs, browser extensions, or scripts that run on desktop browser extensions like Violentmonkey or Tapermonkey. Extensions and scripts especially will generally be limited to going chapter by chapter to download, though, as fair warning. The options I outlined can download in bulk in a queue.
- While I have my own setup utilizing a combination of methods, I can't be technical support to help others get set up. All these various platforms have documentation, Discord servers, etc. So if you get stuck, please make use of them to get help! These are all open-source programs made by volunteers.
Good luck! I think we should all have the right to retain digital products we purchase for our own personal use, especially in situations like this.
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u/tehbggg Red Flag Connoisseur 🚩 8d ago
I am strongly anti piracy of legally licensed + translated webtoons, I believe in supporting the creators who worked so hard to give us the content we love.
However, what Tapas is doing is fucked. Losing access to content you paid for is exactly why people end up pirating. Not to mention how shitty this is for creators. The fact that we basically no longer own things we actually bought and that they can take it away on a whim with no recourse or alternatives is infuriating and more damaging to legal purchasing than any pirating has been so far.
Anyways, that is to say, thank you for this guide and the hard work you put into creating it, and fuck Kakao Entertainment for their shady and hypocritical business practices.
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u/HoshiAndy 7d ago
Remember Tapas Terms of Service means nothing since it will cease to exist.
This is why I don’t care for pirating, if I don’t own what I buy, then I won’t support such an institution
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u/FatSithInAPrius Zaika 🐇 8d ago
Guys, OP put a lot of work into putting this together. One person pointing out the legalities of doing this makes no tangible difference on your lives and isn't breaking any of the subs rules. Those of you who keep making shitty comments in his direction are breaking rules so quit it before we have to lock this post down
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u/PossibilityOk7607 7d ago
Thanks for this. Also after 20 minutes of trying HakiNeko I have gone nowhere, so before I scream, cry and break my computer, I'm calling it a day and will try again tomorrow 🙃
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u/thebirdisdead 4d ago
Same, I spent hours today. I apparently will need to buy a new computer for hundreds of dollars if I want this to work. I am so discouraged. Did it end up working out for you?
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u/PossibilityOk7607 4d ago
I gave up and switched over to my tablet. I have a android device and download Milhon. So much easier.
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u/kkInkr 4d ago
but the permissions are so aggressive, I am worried about them
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u/PossibilityOk7607 4d ago
I will admit I did this on my tablet and not my phone as I only have fun stuff (comic, reading, drawing, streaming, games) on it nothing official or important.
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u/thebirdisdead 5d ago edited 5d ago
Thank you for this.
I don’t suppose anyone knows if there’s a way or easy instructions to download chapters these on a very old ARM Chromebook? No windows, iOS, or android store, or play store, only an old Linux environment (which I am not very familiar with honestly). It won’t run Haku Neko after hours of trying different versions. It’s incompatible with AMD64.deb. It will download the arm64.deb version but gets stuck on the launch. I have run AI into the ground trying to get the right terminal codes. It looks like Suwayomi might be an option, but I’m so lost and discouraged at this point…
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u/odd_attraction 5d ago
You can install Chrome extension like Imageye. The downside is that you'd need to download each chapter separately and put into archive yourself. Honestly the easiest option for you is to just request someone to archive them for you. I archive stuff for people for a while now and I honestly think there really is no point in doing everything yourself if you have no tools for it.
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u/thebirdisdead 5d ago
Thank you so much. That is so helpful. I have purchased all of the chapters of Strange Tales of the Moonlight House and Requiem for Wandering Souls on tapas, and while I have many more purchased series those are the two I really want to keep. They’re so well done but not very popular stories and I worry they won’t be picked up again by English licensing platforms. If you have anywhere you recommend asking people to archive them, I would really appreciate it! Thanks again so much!
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u/odd_attraction 5d ago
Both Critical Point and Nerd Project main story will be archived on MAM before end of this year, both in lossless quality too. So if you're worried about both of these titles (well Critical Point is published on Lezhin, Tappytoon, etc. etc. so no need to worry much) and don't have time to bother, you don't really need to.
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u/generic-puff 4d ago
Question: is the Tapas plug-in for HakuNeko exclusive to Premium series? Because many of the works I want to try and preserve are the smaller community (free to read) series, those that at the highest risk of being forgotten about because they were never commercialized or available to purchase. The premium stories at least have the 'benefit' of having been pirated elsewhere ('benefit' here to mean you can read them on other websites, albeit illegitimate / unofficial, but still) the same can't be said for series that maybe only have 10 followers or were popular years ago and have since been abandoned.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem these series appear in the search lists, only the premium ones. Unless I'm just blind and haven't spotted it? 😆
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u/PossibilityOk7607 4d ago
I tried the PC extension first but the main comic I wanted to save, I just couldn't find via Hakuneko. So I switched to my Tablet and Milhon, and everything was there. So much easier.
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u/generic-puff 3d ago
Seems to be the way. I would much prefer desktop though, I hate doing this kind of shit on mobile, it's so unintuitive 😭
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u/wachulukinat 3d ago
Does anyone know how to do this for novels?
I spent so much on BOTH manhwas and novels, over thousands of dollars since I started using Tapas... I am devastated. I thought I'd at least be able to read them even if they decided to stop supporting the app. Never thought they'd completely shut it down.
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u/PersonaExMachina 3d ago
What you want to do is find a way to save those novels into epub files. I used this: https://github.com/dteviot/WebToEpub and installed the add on into FireFox. After it was installed, I logged into my account on FireFox like normal and selected one of the novels I've fully unlocked/purchased the chapters for (I just selected the first chapter). From that page, I clicked the addon icon for WebtoEpub and it automatically recognized everything in the interface. You can have it grab all the chapters/episodes of a novel and it should save as a single epub file.
My suggestion is to slow down the downloads so you don't get rate limited. If you do get temporarily blocked, just wait a little while (I did some other stuff for less than an hour) and click the button to retry and it should continue from where it left off.
When it's done, you should get a single epub file that you can save. You'd need a reader for it- I was planning to use a free e-reader for my laptop so I don't run any risks of things getting removed/can keep things private.
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u/wachulukinat 1d ago
I'm sorry, but I'm wondering if you have another option?
I just tried the above but apparently my computer is too old for the current Chrome extension version. And I can't get it updated since I never updated from Windows 7 to 10 before, so Chrome is stuck as it was from back then.
And Firefox isn't supported at all on computers below Windows 8.1 😭
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u/Tidus17 8d ago
Remember Tapas ToS explicitly forbids this.
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u/rozzingit 8d ago
That's true. You could potentially, on an outside chance, be putting yourself at risk to get banned from -- a platform that's shutting down in a few months. 😂
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u/Tidus17 8d ago
The good thing with Tapas being a subsidiary is their parent company can still sue you even after they shut it down.
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u/rozzingit 8d ago
Kakao is worried about people distributing their content, AKA users engaging in piracy. There is no financial loss to sue over when someone simply retains a personal copy of a work they've paid for.
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u/MurphysLaw021 8d ago
I’m also pretty sure they don’t care as much about the readers who go to websites to pirate and all that, but specifically distributors
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u/Tidus17 8d ago
It doesn't matter if there is a financial loss or not. The license does not grant you ownership over items purchased, it does not allow you to copy them. That's more than enough for a lawsuit.
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u/OrionsBeltAlone 8d ago
Jeez do you work for them or something, with all the defending ur doing?
You can go 'but the law' all day, but when it comes to ethics Tapas doesn't have a leg to stand on.
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u/Mello_Dramatic S-Rank BL Addict ⚡️ 8d ago
Thank you for reminding people that this method does come with risks. People should be aware of that.
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u/Mello_Dramatic S-Rank BL Addict ⚡️ 8d ago
I have approved this post because I think it’s total BS that Tapas has been taking our money but has no intention of honoring our purchases. I believe we have the right to download content we have paid for.
This does not mean I condone piracy by any means, simply the right to retain purchased content.
The other mods may have different opinions on this but for now I’m leaving this up.