Thank you for such a warm welcome! Yes, we are indeed fortunate enough to have Japanese class in school. I’m glad knowing that the ABBC is a good choice, but I do worry about how difficult some of the material may be. Having said that, I’ll be relying on everyone here to help us out as we read (decipher 
) through Horimiya! Hopefully, at some point I’ll be able to return the favor!
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Regarding reading vs deciphering, I wrote about that in this post for anyone who wants to know more about that.
It’s the two collapsed details sections under the image.
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There is not one, but that would definitely be a good idea. It would mean I have a proper home for my longer post explaining things instead of it just being randomly posted around. 
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Wowzers at those compression artifacts! Based on inference I guess it’s supposed to say 「ヴィジュアル」 but the only character I can recognize is ア.
Complaints about compression artifacts in digital manga
Based on the filename I hoped this problem would only affect Kindle, but after taking a look at the ホリミヤ free samples on Bookwalker.jp, no such luck. The furigana really gets lost in this compression noise throughout. The furigana also seems to suffer from something almost like bad subpixel aliasing, making them appear gray rather than black. I’ve noticed compression before but never quite to this extent.
Did they run these free samples through an extra round of compression? The images certainly look like they’ve been compressed multiple times. For a brief moment I entertained the thought that these are scans but it does say 「デジタル版 Ver.1.00」 towards the end, dated 2013年5月1日.
So I continued digging! That last page in the Bookwalker preview had a printed link to http://sqex.to/jp_manga_support. One of the answers had the URL マガジン＆ブックス | SQUARE ENIX in it, which these days redirects to マガジン＆ブックス | SQUARE ENIX.
Based on the preview available at ホリミヤ | Gファンタジー | SQUARE ENIX, it seems the files are in much better quality than Bookwalker.jp or Kindle? Is this a case where the publisher has updated their digital edition later and resellers like Kindle and BookWalker just didn’t get the memo?
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Sorry if this is a dumb question, but on that site is there a way to make those into flashcards, or would that be something I’d have to do myself?
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You would have to do that yourself, I’m afraid. If you have Anki and an extension such as Yomichan or Migaku, you can easily create Anki cards from individual words.
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Awesome, I will look into that! Thanks!
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Here is a comparison with Kobo:
Publisher website
Textbox
Whole page details:
- Filesize: 677.4 KiB
- Resolution: 886x1236
Kobo (free trial volume)
Textbox
Whole page details:
- Filesize: 244.9 KiB
- Resolution: 900x1280
It’s hard to say because Kobo (and I expect the same is true for BookWalker) uses a higher resolution than the publisher has.
I imagine the originals are a higher resolution, and were separately resized to reach file size targets for each platform.
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Yep, it’s horrendous, and afaik it affects the entire series. Not sure why. Upscaling helps some in the almost readable cases, but not much.
It’s not just the free samples tho. What you see there is the full size release.
I did check just in case (was hard, had to hack into the code to zoom), and yep
It’s not much better tho, I’d say it probably makes some text a bit more readable, but not a huge amount.
I’d definitely recommend anyone that was considering getting a physical copy to try it out, to do it with this manga. For us digital folk tho, mokuro exists.
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It really looks like there are some changes – look at this rewritten freehand text:
(I actually prefer the “old?” freehand as it seems to be a bit bigger.)
Edit: it goes beyond freehand text. Look at the shading of the ribbon in the last panel.
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Well, there’s a fun activity in itself.
Publisher
Release (via Kobo)
(What happened to the パン!?)
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Got eaten
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‘-’
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It turned into Bomberman?
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This makes me want to start reading it now and just save my questions for when the book club starts 
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That’s certainly a route people have taken before. It’s not uncommon even.
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Even though a lot of the material was copied and pasted from my pre-written postings, somehow, I managed to spend two and a half hours on a rough draft!
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Well, I kinda saw that coming. People expressed interest for it back when I first nominated it, but for some reason that didn’t really translate into votes. Story of all my nominations, really…
Flying Witch did that too.
That’s what we in the biz call “WaniKani book clubs shaping the Japanese publishing industry.” There’s a noticeable trend of book club books getting a new release or a reprint soon after getting chosen here.
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Wait, you aren’t getting paid by the Japanese publishing industry to vote for the books that’ll get a new release/reprint soon? Is it just me?
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Horiymiya should be interesting. I loved it in english many moons ago (and the anime), though I found it a bit overall meandering at the end of the day. But I never did end up finishing it…
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