I’ve been trying to get Japanese ebooks, but am coming across issues of not having a Japanese VPN. I don’t really want to pay for one - is there a way to get around this? I don’t just want PDFs, since I want to be able to look up words on my ipad. Thanks for your help!
I bought some eBooks a few weeks back and had to use a VPN travel to Japan. Just checked to be sure, I have all my settings exactly like it’s described in the link. Also using tenso.
It’s been a few months since I bought anything and I only got a few things so they could have changed it. I think I remember seeing some posts about Amazon JP catching on that you’re not in Japan and stopping you from buying anything…
If anyone does give it a try can you report back if it still works or not?
You could try SoftEther. Just connect to a Japanese IP, buy something once, and then you’re usually good for a couple months. I haven’t had issues for my last ~70 purchases.
Digital distribution tends to be region specific. I think it’s like a legal thing to make sure publishers don’t come in conflict with each other on accident.
Right now the language is english, and region is japan. Is that what you mean?
When I go to kindle books it says “Not currently available”
I was even just in Japan, and couldn’t buy books on my account when I was there. I wonder if it’s because the first address I put in was a US address. I since deleted that from my account so that the only address is Japanese.
I meant the region in “Manage Your Content and Devices” > Country/Region Settings. This has to be set to Japan, otherwise it won’t work in my experience. I’ve once suggested this to another poster on this forum and it fixed their issue.
But as the others said, I can’t rule out completely that you don’t need to be in Japan (virtually or for real) every once in a while for this to keep working.
And once you have the Kindle books, the first thing I usually do is extract them to text using Calibre (you need an old version of the Kindle Cloud reader installed, won’t work with newer versions). Then I paste this text in japanese.io (my favorite way of reading at the moment) or use an iOS app called Wakaru to read the content. I’m quite disappointed with the Kindle built in dictionary lookup.