hi! i’m planning on participating in the Absolute Beginners Book Club, but I have a couple of questions regarding purchasing. im hoping someone can tell me the differences between the three methods of being able to read Japanese mangas or light novels, as it’s my first time purchasing a book in the Japanese language. i’d also like to know if once I’ve purchased it, will I be able to keep it forever and transfer it to another form of media like iBooks or my Google Drive for ease of access. i’d also like to know which of the three (if any) allows copy and text so I can mine unknown vocabulary/kanji or grammar structures/sentences.
oh, and if anyone knows where to purchase physical copies instead of only e-books, please let me know. AmazonJP has an expensive shipping cost
Others can probably give better answer than me. But the ABBC usually reads manga. For manga, I buy on bookwalker, and then take screenshots before running mokuro on that volume. That way I can open the HTML page in a web browser and use Yomitan!
Unfortunately for bookwalker, it is not easy / doable to easily transfer them to other media.
When I buy books, I buy from rakuten / kobo. That way I can get them in calibre as an e-pub, use a tool to remove the DRM and then I can read it on ttsu and use Yomitan.
For shipping books I have used and know others use this site: https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/ however, the shipping is still expensive, so I would recommend to buy lots of books when you first buy.
I recommend searching the forums on things like bookwalker, kobo, rakuten, mokuro and you might find a solution that best fits you! And maybe someone else who can answer your question better
I can’t remember if I’ve done it with Kobo, but back when it was easier with Amazon, I’d strip manga just like a book, except convert to zip not epub. Unzip, and the pages are in the images folder (cover usually one directory up tho). That was how I made backups of the manga I bought.
Suruga-ya sells mostly used books, and has free shipping campaigns frequently. Mandarake is another option, if you can find what you’re looking for. Their setup is more confusing though. I use Cdjapan or Bookwalker, depending on what I’m looking for
If you’re talking novels, Bookwalker allows unlimited copying iirc. For manga not really. There is a script floating around to let people backup from Bookwalker… And that backup, you would be able to run through a program called mokuro
it’s good to know that you can still take screenshots on BookWalker despite how tedious that may be. I think worse case scenario, I’ll end up doing what you do which is taking screenshots and running Mokuro. i’ve heard of CDJapan and know how expensive the shipping is there
thanks for this! i’m familiar with natively but didn’t know they had a free category that can be found.
I find that by about five or six books that’s usually enough for the shipping cost to be a reasonable amount per book. You also (as with amazon JP) don’t have to pay Japanese consumption tax because it’s an export. They pack the books they ship carefully, which is much better than Amazon JP – I used Amazon JP a time or two in the past and sometimes books would arrive slightly damaged by having moved around in the packaging during transit.
The other thing to watch out for here is that cdjapan has an option to pay destination country import duties when you buy something. That’s better than having the courier firm charge you an extra fee to do it, but they don’t correctly handle cases where books are rated lower for duty than normal goods. In the UK books are rated zero VAT, so you have to tell cdjapan not to charge you for taxes (there’s a checkbox in the checkout flow somewhere).
