Manga - where to find it

Personally, I think it’s cool to read manga in person. If you’re in the US, you won’t really find any that are Japanese language unless you hit up that Japanese book store in Los Angeles. But you can definitely order them via eBay.

One thing I’ve discovered is that if you search for the name of the manga in Japanese in Amazon UK, you’ll often find Japanese sellers listing second hand Japanese manga volumes or sets with the same name as on Amazon JP. These often only charge £2 - £3 shipping, so it makes them really affordable. I don’t think there are any additional customs charges for importing books in the UK until the value exceeds £135, I’ve never been charged customs for buying sets of manga from Japan.

Why am I the only one who didn’t realise this :sob: at least I found out now, I suppose…

https://bookwalker.jp for manga, for sure. You can even sign up on their English site and it works in both storefronts. Don’t have to give money to a monopolistic corporation like Amazon that way either. Whichever retailer you use, digital is definitely the way to go for manga if you’re learning. And the prices are so much cheaper since you’re not paying S&H.

I’ll second eBookJapan for picking up manga for free. Once you have an account there you can usually add several full books for free to your library each week. It’s usually the first book of a series to try to get you hooked on it, but if reading practice is the goal then there’s plenty to choose from over time. I got my account a few months back and have about a hundred books in the library waiting to be read. In addition to the permanently free books, they also offer a rotating selection of limited-time free books that you can only read until a certain date.

As previously mentioned, this method requires that you’re not too picky about the particular books you read but it does make for great reading practice. I also like their reader, which has an option to automatically zoom wherever your cursor is pointed. It makes reading complicated kanji easier for me.

Why?

Not for free, but I use Amazon.co.jp to buy manga :slight_smile: It’s usually really cheap, but the shipping makes up for it!

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There are more but I don’t remember at the moment

For this specific one try http://www.cdjapan.co.jp I get all my manga from there because sometimes amazon.co.jp removes the ability to buy certain manga overseas.

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our local library usually has a few manga for sale at their quarterly book sales. last year i bought 9 volumes for 25¢ each…

In any decent reader you can zoom in on the text to make out small kanji. You can use tools like capture2text to OCR some text. You can take that OCR’d text and plop it into any of the neat tools online for looking up kanji/words/getting the gist of something via a translation tool. And you can do this all while simply alt-tabbing between the reader and the tools rather than looking up and down from a paper book to a screen and back.

(Also, I like to take screenshots when reading, but that’s not really relevant.)

I just don’t like reading on my computer. :man_shrugging:

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Another possibility would be to pick up a cheap, complete used set from a third-party Marketplace seller on Amazon, using Tenso or another forwarding service (like CDJapan when they get their proxy-shopping back online sometime this month). Seven volumes of manga, plus handling, via SAL (1-2 weeks), should work out to somewhere in the 20GBP range, and you can usually fill in values for customs by yourself (or they’ll copy the price from Amazon if the seller includes an invoice).

If you do this, it’s important that you purchase the set as a single item so you don’t get dinged by consolidation and repacking fees.

You can also sometimes negotiate with sellers to have them add an international shipping rate or opt-in to international delivery by Amazon.

However, for the series you mentioned, which I assume was meant to be 聲の形, not 声の形 (same reading on the kanji and similar meanings), https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00PTMHUMA/ is its availability on Amazon.com (I’ve ordered stuff from the first four sellers in that list through .ca; they’re legit and condition is generally as-described, with “good” meaning significant shelf-wear, but no tears), and https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00PTMHUMA/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_used_olp_sr for UK, which is much more expensive for some reason, maybe because they’re liable for clearing VAT themselves.

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