Oh snap. I had been looking into that but I couldn’t find any good resources on how to get it set up. Is it baked into Calibre or do you need to do some finagling to get the dictionaries to pop up?
All you need is to open a book with selectable text with the Calibre viewer, select some text and a small popup will show up, there you click on Look up/search selected words and a window will show up with the results. On the bottom of that window there’s a add more sources button. There you can add new dictionaries, just need a name and a URL, e.g. ichi.moe - Japanese transliteration and dictionary service or {word} - Jisho.org
{word} needs to be there where the words you looked up in the URL would be.
Looks like this by default:
(I disabled the little popup next to the marked words)
The result window can also be popped out, resized and moved to another monitor. It’s really handy
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How do you highlight things in their in-browser viewer? I’ve been using book walker for a while and rikaichamp doesn’t seem to work on anything except the title.
If you click into the text first and hold briefly, you can highlight the text and your selection will appear in a pop up that the browser extension can read. It’s a tad less convenient than on a regular website, but you get used to it quickly.
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I also read ebooks on Bookwalker. As for selection it’s primarily light novels and manga. Recent Trash Taste podcast had a guest from Bookwalker and she said that the Japanese customers mostly read light novels there, so the selection must be pretty good. Bookwalker is a subsidiary of Kadokawa, so I guess you can expect most of Kadokawa’s staff there. I also see a lot of stuff from Kodansha.
Bookwalker is convenient as I can buy Japanese books using my European card and with a VPN or any workarounds.
The problem with Bookwalker though is their horrendous apps. The desktop browser one is decent but the mobile ones are the worst ebook read apps I ever tried. So behind the times.
I could download the international version of the app in my country. Luckily it displays the books I bought in the JP store but some of the features don’t work, for example auto bookshelf sync.
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THIS IS A TOTAL GAME CHANGER FOR ME.
I got it to work for a novel but not for manga, but alas. Thankfully I already got fast enough at kanji look-up on my jisho app on my phone, which has already been enough for that.
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Yeah, you’d need a OCR like KanjiTomo or capture2text for manga. They’re just pictures thus you can’t highlight any text.
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Hot dang, I just got it all set up. The holding click instantly searches it. Wow, this works really really well. Thanks for taking the time!
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Clearly you haven’t tried the ebook Japan one 
But yeah, there is nothing amazing about the app. It does its job, albeit a bit slowly, period. (I like the highlighting feature, though, and use it a lot.)
But like you said, no VPN tampering, no address faking, it just works from anywhere. And their selection of books is really wide, not only manga and light novels, but also regular novels and classics.
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I’m curious, when you say classics, how classic are you talking?
I liked it too… until I hit the limit of 50 highlights per book! 
Since then I don’t use it. Just have a google doc where I copy phrases I want to take note of.
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Probably all sorts of “classic” 
I’ve seen many authors from 19th/20th century, like Tanizaki, Mishima, Dazai, Kawabata, Akutagawa, but also much older works, like Kamo no Chōmei or the Pillow book.
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I also recommend the Japanese IO chrome extension! It’s another tool that lets you hover over words to see the furigana, click them to see dictionary definitions, as well as the option to see the kanji that make up the word. I just started using it and like it a lot. ^-^
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I don’t know if you can help but I’ve been having problems getting the full book on calibre. I’ve removed the DRM but not all of the pages are showing up (they’re not blank or anything, just not there). Am I doing something super obvious wrong? This lookup feature is so smooth it would make reading so much easier if I could get it to work.
I have no idea what or if you’re doing anything wrong since you didn’t say what you were doing. I haven’t had any missing pages after removing DRM/converting any book yet (did you change any of the conversion settings?)
Maybe post some more information, which kind of book from where and what exactly you were doing. Did you check the logs of the conversion job?
But most important, did you make sure you’re using the Calibre 5 beta (4.99)? It kinda sounds like you’re trying to scroll and it just jumps around from chapter to chapter or something like it does in the current stable (4.23). Japanese books are a mess with the stable version.
Whoops, I should have put more detail in my post. It turns out I had downloaded the wrong one! I was using 4.23, added the DRM plugin, added the book…then obviously couldn’t read most of it.
Changing to the beta version seems to have solved everything - thanks!
Sure, no problem! Glad it works. Just keep in mind that the DeDRM plugin doesn’t work with the beta yet. (They’re working on it though) So you’ll want to use the stable version for that for the time being.
It’s so great! Really? That’s interesting, as the book I’m currently reading (わたしの幸せな結婚) had DRM but it seems to be reading ok? I uninstalled the other version and then installed the beta, and the plugin was still there (must not have uninstalled everything cleanly) as was the book - and I was able to open it and view all the pages. Perhaps it was because it was still in the library or something?
Yeah, if you unDRM before switching, then the DRM is gone anyway. Stable and beta use the same folders for library and configs so the imported books and settings should stay the same.
Is the plugin still listed under Preferences > Plugins > File type? If so, then you’re probably using a different one than I do or there’s some other magic going on. 
Hmm, that makes more sense. Ahaha, now you mention it it’s not! Since there is stuff listed under that folder anyway, my eyes completely glossed over reading it properly. What I get for not putting on my glasses! 
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