Also ordered this one and the Kitty detective book from your old thread. I am just on Wanikani level 3, but I really want to read or try my hands on easy material to build up my vocabulary.
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Received my copy from Amazon Japan today (took 5 days to arrive where I live in France). I’m surprised by the book cover size. I flipped through couple of pages: it looks very nice, can’t wait for the ABBC to start.
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Mine arrived today! Didn’t realize it was a workbook of sorts (shows you how attentive I was when reading the introduction). Looks really good, didn’t have time to check out the quality much further, but flipped through it and it looks great.
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It looks like I am joining - just ordered a copy through Kinokinuya, should take 3-4 weeks to arrive in store.
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Hi, did you have to pay customs on your Amazon Japan order when the package arrived? I live in Europe too and I never ordered from there. Thank you!
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Import taxes / customs are already included in the shipping costs that you see when you place the order on Amazon. So you don’t have to deal with delayed deliveries or pay more than what you see in your shopping cart
They usually charge a little bit more for the taxes than they have to (I guess in order to be on the safe side with currency fluctuations), and you usually get a small refund a few months after your order to correct that
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I don’t know for sure. I think not, as I only paid when checking out on amazon, nothing later
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Amazon for sure is registered as a foreign market, so you pay customs upfront.
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We might not influence publication of an ebook but I think we definitely influence the “people who bought this book were also interested in…” recommendations.
I love the idea of people buying the Happiness manga in Japan and wondering why Amazon is then recommending they might want to buy a children’s book about the prefectures…
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Oh that’ll be hilarious. Now you’ve got me wondering if similar book clubs are generally the reason for odd recommendations like that lol
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My package arrived in Germany in less than 4 business days - no customs charges. An uncritical google suggests incoming books are exempt from customs charges in the EU regardless of origin.
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Really?? That’s very interesting! I might just order a lot more books then 
Does anyone know if this is for real?
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I will join in if I can get the book.
This will be my second attempt at reading. I bought another book for absolute beginners but it sent me back to japanese being lots of squiggles. It can stay on the shelf for a couple of years. Hopefully I will have some progress with this.
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No customs, but you still need to pay 19% import tax which is included in Amazon’s shipping calculations. At least that’s true for us Germans (customs being Zoll and import tax being Einfuhrumsatzsteuer)
Yeah, but it sounds better than you might think. Import taxes have to be paid either way, customs is just something that can go on top of it. Here in Germany, customs can only be charged once the value of the imported goods are above 150€ and there are certain excemptions (including books) where no customs are charged. The 19% import taxes are always charged though (and before July 2021, they weren’t charged if the value of the imported goods were below 22€ or so but that rule doesn’t exist anymore)
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Import taxes can be very high if not already paid before the package enter the country.
I’m in france, they change the pricing last summer and i see package with value of $100 with €80 of taxes. Worst cases are things like $5 of product + 10€ of taxes (mostly on chinese crap).
We see these taxes less often than last summer, i think most webstore have adapte to either pay it directly or offering you the choice to pay it or not, or it can be the transpoter that inform you to pay online.
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Yeah, I’ve also had the pleasant experience that someone sent me something with DHL and DHL always take care of the import taxes for you - but if they’re not paid for it in advance, they charge ridiculously high fees for paying the taxes for you. So that’s a way how the costs can add up quickly. And I would guess something like that might have been the reason you ended up paying so much more
But as I and others in this thread have said, this is never a problem with Amazon Japan. They take care of everything very well and you just pay what you see when you place your order
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Ha no, I didn’t pay more; I make people pay … It’s my work to deliver package, but even that way i don’t like taxes
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I also got my books today this morning. I ordered them Sunday afternoon, so pretty speedy, considering it’s going all to Germany! I was surprised since it was supposed to arrive tomorrow. I ordered four books and paid like 55€ for books and shipping and didn’t have to pay extra custom fees. I guess they were included.
I am also surprised my the amount of texts, especially in the old absolute beginners book. Can we talk about the absolute Beginner part? I feel pretty intimidated 
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Even though it looks like a lot of text, there’s lots of furigana and the grammar is fairly simple. Also, about 1/3-1/2 of the text is part of a questions section where we can check our understanding. 
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I hear you It’s my first book as well! I bought another one (Scary stories to read in 10 minutes - For first grade students in Primary school I think?!) and yeah… well… Let’s just say that it took me about 3 hours to understand 1 page (genius here 
).
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