premise: I’ve been getting into kindle and audible books from amazon, and I wanted to see if there were any Japanese books I could try listening to during my commute. The American Amazon.com website provides a very limited selection, so I went to the Amazon.co.jp website instead.
primary concern: Never purchased international content before, and I’d like to keep everything legal.
Where I am now: I was able to purchase a japanese kindle book, but if I want to read it I need a kindle app installed with a Japanese locale. Did some googling, turns out I can get a Japanese address from somewhere called tenso.com. They call themselves a “proxy purchasing service”. Seems like when you sign up they give you a Japanese address when you sign up. That sounds sketttttchy.
I’ve been buying Japanese kindle books for years and have used Tenso for just as long. Don’t worry, they’re fine and its the Japanese address I use for things I need addresses for
(though I did recently sign up for/find out about blackship by white rabbit. But no experience with them)
@anon75098302 Did you have to get a special Kindle app for your phone to read them? I noticed people saying on a different forum that the Kindle phone app blocks logins to Japanese accounts from the US. I have a VPN, is that all you need to around that?
I haven’t logged out of my account in a long time so I can’t say. Last time I logged in (which was probably a couple months ago) I had no issue logging into my JP account. All I did was download the Kindle app in the US Play Store (I’m on Android) and log in with my JP account. Have you tried logging in to see if it blocks you?
The only time I need a VPN is when I want to buy things on both the website and in the app. If I just went to read/use the app, I can have it off.
(also make sure the region of your Amazon JP account is set to Japan)
(also if you want easier options that don’t need a VPN/JP address, there’s places like Honto or ebookJapan. Less hassle but of course not kindle quality)
Has anybody tried instead to use a jp account on kindle device, instead of smartphone or tablet? I’m very interested on buy original manga and read them on this eye-relaxing device.
To my knowledge you can’t read manga (or comics) on a regular kindle no matter what account you use - the resolution is just not high enough. It has been a while since I tried, but the last time I wanted to read a comic on my kindle the website told me to use a kindle fire/app instead.
My wife’s Japanese account works fine on a UK Kindle. Recently she did get a message saying she was no longer in Japan - I assume they allow a few purchases from outside Japan before they decide you’ve left permanently. A quick purchase via a VPN has reset this.
We downloaded free books via the phone app before purchasing an actual Kindle just to make sure it was possible.
I use smartdnsproxy.com which is a proxy DNS that routes a variety of overseas TV services (including Japanese) via DNS so it’s easy to add to TVs, FireTV etc. As part of their offering they also offer a free VPN which can be added to PCs, Android tablets etc easily. I’ve been very happy with it so far.
Personally I use the one University of Tsukuba has:
I use it through SoftEther on PC and just set it up with the basic Android VPN settings as well; the links are the guides they have to using them. It’s free and has worked well for my purposes (I’m not going for total anonymity or anything) for years.
@Arcon1ous I think the only thing with Bookwalker is that (from what I remember) the only payment option for those out of Japan is paypal? Otherwise it’s Japanese card/payment methods only.
I’d honestly recommend ebookJapan over Bookwalker if one doesn’t use/doesn’t want to use paypal. Same offerings, similar style of reader (as in fairly basic), but ebookJapan accepts non-Japanese cards. Over them both I’d choose Honto (significantly better reader, particularly for novels) but the mobile apps are region blocked on the app stores
I’ve been using my Debit card and they’ve been accepting it just fine. So maybe they’ve updated it since you tried it? and the mobile reader seems to be fine. My main complaint with it is that their desktop reader currently doesn’t work if you signed in using the autosignup feature off of one of your phone accounts, so you have to use the mobile reader or their browser reader, which IIRC doesn’t work offline. But other than that minor complaint, I haven’t had a problem with it since I started using it a week or so ago.
