なぜ?どうして?科学のお話 / Absolute Beginner Bookclub

@kumakathy Maybe it’s different because I buy from BookLive and use their app.

@crumpet
At least for BookLive, I only had to use VPN once to download the app but afterwards / since then I have been able to buy and download books for the app (phone and desktop) without VPN and with a non-Japanese credit card. I’m from Germany, btw.
But I don’t use apple products, so this might not be of any help for you.

Yeah, the app shows up on the Play Store only with Japanese VPN, I guess. But there’re third party APK websites that have it.

I’ve never purchased a Japanese E-book before, in fact I’ve never purchased a e-book anywhere other than on amazon kindle.

I always assumed I’d just get an amazon.jp account (I’m usually over an VPN anyways, so I’d just switch it over to jp), buy the e-book, get rid of the DRM and just copy it to my kindle or just read on my PC.

But is there any other advantages to these others sites like bookwalker, honto etc. over Amazon?
I assumed Amazon has the largest library of e-books.

@frayderike it seems Book Walker is the other way around, requiring VPN for purchase but not for the app itself. It’s apparently more difficult to browse a foreign app store on iOS than it is on Android and not simply a case of switching region or using a VPN.

@Micki I’d rather not use a public VPN so I deployed a one-click OpenVPN instance on Vultr in Tokyo to try this out. Good news is I have now purchased successfully through the Book Walker website (with VPN) and downloaded on my phone (without VPN).

Doing it this way means I got a private VPN instance which only cost me 1 US cent as I immediately destroyed it after use.

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Glad you’re sorted. I found BookWalker really easy to use and bought the last few book club books there. It was nice that I just needed to create an account and then I could buy the books straight away and download them through the app.

The app has been ok. Interestingly on Chi’s Sweet Home there was an update of the book file at some point and the updated book was of higher quality than what I’d originally downloaded.

I haven’t seen a way to use book walker files on a Mac which might be an issue for some people.

This was the first one I had difficulty buying. But like you say you just need the VPN switched on to get the book in your cart, and to complete the purchase. Once it’s purchased you can download it without the VPN.

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I’m so glad I was finally able to get this book (digital version) from BookLive (thanks to these two posts!)!

BookLive has a reader app, that unfortunately is not available for my country, but I can still read using their browser reader, even on mobile. To sign up I didn’t have to provide a Japanese address (plus there was a much appreciated 50% off welcome coupon!). They had different payment options including credit card, I chose to pay using Google Pay to handle the credit card info and it worked alright.

So, yes, I’ll be joining the bookclub in February! It’s my first bookclub, looking forward to the challenge! :smiley:

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Not sure if it works without VPN but have you tried downloading their desktop app? Maybe you’ll like that one more than the browser reader. I haven’t used the browser reader as I have the desktop app for my computer but I can highlight words, take notes (this feature could be better though imo) and easily copy & paste vocab and kanji to look them up (if it’s not a “picture” book like mangas).

Just checked and it doesn’t seem like the browser reader has those features.

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Is there a way to get the desktop app to present two pages at a time? It seems this book uses two page spreads - I did have a quick look around the settings but nothing jumped out at me. (The browser mode seems to just switch when the window is wide enough to hold both pages.)

Thanks for the suggestion! But I use a Linux desktop…

I need to spend more time figuring out the browser reader, but I just gave a quick try with this book. It looks like I can highlight and add notes. I can’t copy & paste a word directly, but once it’s selected the reader gives me the option to search it on Google or Wikipedia, and from there I can copy & paste it elsewhere.

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Ordered the book on Amazon.co.jp, I hope it arrives in time.
My first book club here.

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I have an Australian credit card which has always worked fine for me.

These are great thanks marcus! I was looking back at the first なぜ book and we put something like this as a tab in the vocab spreadsheet. That could be handy for us ebook readers in keeping track of the pages in the physical book once the spreadsheet is set up.

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Hi everyone, I just bought the Kindle eBook (and deDRM’d it), and am looking forward to (trying to follow along with) my first book club!
Not sure yet if I’ll need to go a bit slower than the schedule, but I’m sure the group will be useful to me regardless. :blush:

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I bought from europe no problem (visa)

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Got my eBook copy via iTunes today. Quite comfortable as I didn’t have to go through a checkout in Japanese. Seems to be an older version though as it has the same cover as the older printed version.

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You’re right it’s only £3.49 on Apple Books, too! It cost me £6.42 on Book Walker :slight_smile:

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I couldn’t believe this! I had to go and check for myself. So easy, I could have bought with no fuss from their UK iTunes Store for half the price!

@zuzu I don’t think I can edit your opening post, do you want to add the iTunes ebook to the list of purchase options?

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Sure thing, will do that once I get home tonight!

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I just received my book from amazon.co.jp - wow, how quick was that?? Ordered it just Tuesday and it came all the way to Germany (together with my Genki books :smile:).

This book looks just great and I really look forward to reading it together with you! :chipmunk:

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This will be my first book club! I’m having a few annoying issues with Amazon.co.jp. I live in Osaka right now and I’ve ordered on Amazon before, however, my book was supposed to arrive last week but JP Post wasn’t sure if I really live here (with my strange katakana name) and just sent it back!
I now sorted things out with JP Post with the help of a Japanese colleague and ordered again.
What a bummer, I shot a really nice deal, but Amazon only refunds the price of the book and not the shipping (and the book was literally 5 Yen).
Anyways, wish me luck that it actually arrives this time! In the worst case I’m gonna go to a book store and buy the pricier one…

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