ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん ・ The Wolf of the Small Forest book club! 🌳 (Absolute Beginner Book Club)

The quality of digital manga varies a lot, mainly depending on the manga itself (how old is it, how big are the letters by default, etc etc), a bit less so depending on where you buy from. In Amazon’s case, it even matters if you are reading through their online viewer, or through a kindle/the amazon app.

For reference, this manga to me seems very good quality. This is a screenshot I took on my phone using the Amazon app:

But using the amazon web reader would get me this sort of resolution:

kép

It’s just the fact, that storing images is inherently costly compared to text. As for the ば-ぱ distinction, they are usually easier to tell apart if you have a ton of experience dealing with the issue. But gotta remember, they are small dots on top of a piece of text that’s already smaller than the main text.

You have two main ways of solving this issue, but both of these require to you have the manga as a set of images, which is harder to do for bookwalker, but not impossible.

  1. You can run mokuro on the images, this is an ocr tool, and it will try to extract the (main) text from the images. After this, you can use a browser extension, like yomichan to look up the words you can’t read the furigana of.
  2. It’s less reliable, but some ai image upscalers can to some extent fix up text. I experimented with this a bit a few months back, and the results, while not great, where pretty decent.
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