I want to obtain 魔女の宅急便 (Kiki’s Delivery Service) and I see a kindle version is available on the Japanese amazon site, however as soon as I login to my account it says it is unavailable and won’t give me the option to purchase the kindle version. I live outside of Japan. Is there any way around this?
Get a legit address through a forwarding service like Japan Depot or Tenso and add that to your Japanese account (separate account and email from your usual, but foreign credit card is fine). There is also a region setting under content, I believe, which needs to be changed. You will need to log out of your non-Japanese account on the Kindle itself and log in with your new credentials.
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Did you sign up on Amazon Japan with your regular Amazon US (or whatever your local Amazon is) account?
If yes, don’t do that. Create a new one. You can’t share content from Amazon JP account to a US (or your local) Amazon account anyway.
If no, then when you are asked for you address, just put any Japanese address in. Any address seems to work if it is Japanese. Use Nintendo’s address if you want! As long as the address you input was the Japanese address first, you don’t need to mess around with changing regions, etc.
Once you have a new account, add your credit card and your local address so the CC doesn’t decline.
You can absolutely buy Kindle content with a Japanese address using a foreign credit card. You can’t, however, purchase digital music this way for… well, who knows.
Once you have the content, you can either convert your Kindle reader to the new account or do what I do. Use your iPhone/Android/Computer with the Kindle app. I like this option as you can easily create flashcards, etc this way.
Newer Kindle devices (Paperwhite and Oasis) save words you look up and allow flashcard creation, with the added benefit of easily loading alternate dictionaries and exporting lists. There may be a way to do that with the apps, but it wasn’t obvious when I tried it.
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Great thanks. I don’t have a Physical kindle just the app on my iPad. How will this work if I already have books from my other amazon account in the app. Do I need to de-register it? So I can only have either my Japanese books or my English books in the app at a single time?
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Process for adding dictionaries is mostly the same from what I remember.
I have an Oasis but haven’t tried making cards there since all my I content is in the app.
Will check it out though, thanks!
If you only have the app on one place, in this case your iPad, you have to log out of one and into the other account. You can’t share account content from different country Amazon accounts.
Every time you log out, it sellers the content for that account. When you log in with the other, you have to download it all again for that account. Every time.
So yes, unfortunately it’s one account it the other, annoyingly.
How that helps and sorry it’s not as easy as we’d all prefer.
The Kindle app for Mac definitely allows you to highlight/take notes and make flashcards. It seems like you need to use one of the predefined dictionaries, and the Japanese one (Progressive Japanese-English Dictionary) is a bit hit-and-miss e.g. it has 二人 but not 同じ and these are basic/common words.
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