I finally decided to stop procrastinating and buy some manga once and for all. So far I’ve only bought the first volume of Ruri Dragon on amazon jp as they seem to have the best ecosystem from what I’ve read.
Now that that first step is out of the way, however, I am starting to wonder where the best place to read would be. My own kindle would be out question as I don’t believe you’re able to sync it up with more than one account–by all means correct me if I’m wrong though!–, which leaves me with either reading on my computer, or on another device altogether.
I don’t love the idea of reading on my laptop as I would inevitably end up switching between tabs fairly often, so I’m thinking a tablet might be the way to go. Do you guys have any suggestions as far as tablets and/or apps to go with it? Ideally it would be an Android tablet so I could install some of the stuff I’ve bought over the years, but if Apple (or even a different e-reader) really offers a better reading experience then I am all ears.
I remember watching some video a long time ago that mentioned the ease some device provided as far as writing notes and looking words up in the dictionary, but for the life of me I can’t remember who or what it was. At the time I didn’t think much of it as reading seemed like such a far away prospect that it barely registed haha
Correct, you’d have to switch the Kindle to your Amazon JP account, losing access to all books you might have bought on their “global” Kindle store.
Plus, the Kindle (unless you’ve one of those Scribe devices) would likely be a little too small to read manga comfortably on, needing a lot of zooming in and that’s not exactly smooth on the Kindle.
I don’t read that much manga, but when I do I use a Samsung 11" Android tablet. It’s maybe a tad too large a screen, but on the other hand the 8.2" e-ink Android device I have feels a tad too small for manga (perfect for books though). Perhaps 10" is the sweetspot?
The advantage of e-ink is that it’ll look as close as possible to a paper print, and to be honest I really like how manga looks on it.
The advantage of a Samsung tablet is that you can use the S-pen to scan text and get instant translations via Google Translate’s OCR - these can be shoddy, but are definitely much better than nothing.
The advantage of a laptop is that you could set up Mokuro to get full text extraction and then Yomitan and whatnot. But yeah… I don’t enjoy reading anything on a laptop/computer screen either.
See here for a comparison between Kindle, AIPaper and the S9 tablet.
If you’d like any other details, just give us a shout
Personally I use an iPad Pro (when not reading physical manga) and it’s very nice. I got it because iPad has a better aspect ratio for manga than Android tablets, but that’s probably the only upside. Android tablets certainly give more flexibility if that’s something you want.
I use a cheap Android tablet with Book Walker for digital manga. I can split screen and have the dictionary on the side for easy lookups (I don’t bother with OCR personally).
Yup, yup, reading anything other than pure text on Kindle is not great. Even though you’re able to zoom, it has to load the entire page every time and it gets old pretty fast, at least on my not-so-current device. Now mokuro is something I was not aware of! And after looking at the linked thread, it does sound nifty. That said, I’d have to look up whether you’re still able to download your purchases on amazon jp. Last I heard they were phasing that out at some point this year. I’ll definitely look into it!
Just by the by, that’s a pretty cool e-reader! Had never heard of them before
I am definitely looking into how to duplicate the app! and two mokuro mentions back to back, the case for reading on my laptop did get a lot stronger.
I was definitely aware of the book club! that was pretty much the deciding factor haha
hahahaha I’m well aware. it’s more of personal thing with not wanting to take my eyes off the “page” completely but I might have to learn to live with it
ah, I’m certainly open to getting one, but it would have to blow the competition out of the water haha it is cool to see different opinions, though. seems like there’s something to be said about each option
that’s a neat setup! I was picturing something like that in my head when making the thread. will keep an eye out for any inexpensive tablets that come my way
That restriction applies only to manual downloads via browser. However, you can use an old version of the Kindle Windows app (I use v1.7.0) to download and then import into Calibre and convert (I read my books with ttsu).
I think it’s possible to set up Mokuro on Android as well, there may be info in the main thread or if not just ask…
I assume for kanji you don’t know, you’ll draw them with pen/finger?
That’s commendable, but I for one would not have the patience for that
I find this thread quite intriguing. Apparently people have many tips and tricks of reading that can be quite nifty. I mainly read on my laptop browser and if I want to look up something I just open a Jisho tab. Everything is very manual and require back and forth between several tabs but I don’t mind it.
If you want to read on a tablet, there’s a Kindle app so you can link your Amazon JP account there. I do that for my English books and manga. Some Japanese digital bookstores or publishers have their own apps too, but they can be region restricted unfortunately.
Or use https://kankan.pt/ for searches by radical. I also put a strong emphasis on studying kanji early on (including writing practice) so that’s kind of my strong suit anyway.
Does OCR deal well with handwritten kanji in mangas? I presume it depends on the author/scan quality.
When I’m doing lookups on a computer (which is mostly when I play games) I use deepl + yomitan usually. I don’t like using jisho because I find it slow, deepl and yomitan are basically instant.
Tried it twice, laughed and cried at the results, moved on and never looked back
But let’s ping @mitrac as she has way more experience than me with OCR for manga.
An actual handwriting keyboard (on Android / touchscreen devices) would autocorrect even if some of the radicals are wrong, especially when you write more than 1 characters.
Google Keyboard can’t be bad, but it has time limit, 2 seconds or so per character, so I used Mazec3, which doesn’t have time limit (but is paid). Time limit can cause more problems than just breaking patience, imo.
Handwriting IME works for Kana too (and probably also alphabets), not just Kanji.
I have seen no handwriting IME with radical search so far, but some Chinese IMEs may have radical stacking (though no chooser UI).
I use handwriting most of the time but sometimes I’ll just be unable to decipher a kanji either because it’s handwritten or because it’s too small and pixelated (also a problem on old videogames sometimes). In these situations I have to be a bit more crafty…
I use an old iPad mini. The screen has about the same dimensions as a printed manga page, so it should be the perfect size. However, my aging eyes would actually prefer slightly larger text, so I sometimes rotate to landscape mode, where it zooms in to show about a half-page at a time.
