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+--- Thread: Kindle books in Japanese... (/thread-11141.html)
Kindle books in Japanese... - Hirakana - 2013-09-28
What are some good Japanese books available on Kindle? I'm starting to read light novels but they're very expensive to import...
.....Alternatively, does anyone have any totally innocent sites where you can download totally innocent legal books in .epub, pdf, .mobi etc?
Kindle books in Japanese... - vileru - 2013-09-28
Search for "innocent book thread".
Kindle books in Japanese... - NickT - 2013-09-29
I have read the following books so far on my Kindle. All of them were purchased legitimately and are available on the amazon.co.jp store:
死神の精度 by 伊坂 幸太郎
ゼロの使い魔 by ヤマグチ ノボル
失はれる物語 by 乙 一
グラスホッパー by 伊坂 幸太郎
ふたり by 赤川 次郎
夏と花火と私の死体 by 乙 一
アリソン by 時雨沢 恵一
七瀬ふたたび by 筒井 康隆
I can't say I necessarily recommend all of them, but without knowing your interests or Japanese level it is hard to say more more. I guess my favorite so far was グラスホッパー, and if you are just starting off reading Japanese novels then ゼロの使い魔 is the easiest one.
If you want to know more about any particular book just ask.
Other books I have purchased but not yet read are below. Again, these are all legitimately available on the amazon.co.jp store:
All You Need Is Kill by 桜 坂洋
終末のフール by 伊坂 幸太郎
超訳ニーチェの言葉 by フリ－ドリヒ・ヴィルヘルム・ニ－チェ, 白取 春彦 (翻訳)
GO by 金城一紀
蛇を踏む by 川上 弘美
ある一日 by いしい しんじ
獣の奏者 by 上橋 菜穂子
暗黒童話 by 乙 一
アンドロイドは電気羊の夢を見るか？ by フィリップ・Ｋ・ディック, 浅倉 久志 (翻訳)
きまぐれロボット by 星 新一
吾輩は猫である by 夏目 漱石
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2013-09-29
So do you still need to use a JP IP address to buy books from the amazon.co.jp store, or have they finally relaxed that policy?
Because every time I look for info, I kept running across a "If you download 5 books from a foreign IP, they'll shut you down until you call them" sort of warning, and that sounds like too much trouble for me to want to deal with.
Kindle books in Japanese... - CarlosE - 2014-04-10
Someone can send me the japanese kindle version of "All you need is kill", i'm trying to translate to spanish from english but the traduction to english is really bad. There is no spanish translation and the few I could translate from english seems really good.
Thanks in advance
Kindle books in Japanese... - Zgarbas - 2014-04-10
Hello, Carlose, and welcome to the forum.
Unfortunately, the forum does not encourage piracy, so please refrain from asking for pirated content in the future. Also, it is generally not a good idea to post your e-mail address on a public forum, so I edited that one out.
Kindle books in Japanese... - JapaneseRuleOf7 - 2014-04-10
NickT Wrote:I have read the following books so far on my Kindle. All of them were purchased legitimately and are available on the amazon.co.jp store:Hi NickT,
Can I ask your impressions of the reading experience? Are you using a dictionary for lookups? (And if so, which one.) Is it similar to reading in a browser using Rikaichan?
Kindle books in Japanese... - NickT - 2014-04-12
Sure, I guess. Overall I would say that I love my Kindle :-)
Actually it is not that simple, so let me explain. I originally bought a Kindle Fire HD, the one that has a colour screen and is like a tablet. You can use internet and so on, so I thought it would be the most useful.
I loved it. I expected to prefer reading paper books, but that was not the case. But, there were many niggling issues that got on my nerves. One is that as a tablet, it is seriously hamstrung; you can only download apps from the Google store, and even though theoretically it is an android device and any android app should work, they have prevented you from installing any app that is not on the Google store. I hear you can hack into it to enable this, but I never bothered. The selection of apps on the Google store is not good, and basically every time I wanted to install something I was unable to. A second more minor complaint is that the screen is a bit reflective, so if you read outdoors on a sunny day (or even indoors close to a window) then it can be a pain sometimes.
The final and most major complaint though is that the dictionary is rubbish. It is a J-J dictionary, which is fine, but it just doesn't work very well. It does not recognise the boundaries between words well, and it is difficult to manually adjust the selection. Also, if the word is conjugated in any way, which almost all verbs and adjectives are, then it will not recognise it. Also for some reason it cannot recognise the 々 character, which prevents the lookup of another large chunk of Japanese vocab. Also, while it is possible to look up Japanese words appearing in the definition, they don't make it easy so it takes a long time. Another final very annoying issue is that it just shows you the first definition of the word it finds, and doesn't let you "find next". Often the first definition is some obscure old word that is no longer used. For example, famously, if you search for "Sensei" (先生) in this dictionary you get this result:
シーサン【先生】
〔中国語。上海地方の訛りから〕
中国で，男子一般の名につけた敬称。呼び掛けにも用いた。
Not very useful I think you will agree, and it happened a surprisingly large percentage of the time.
To remedy some but not all of these problems I purchased the following J-E dictionary on the Kindle store: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Japanese-English-Dictionary-13th-Ed-ebook/dp/B00AKIUDAY/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1397294220&sr=1-4&keywords=japanese+english+dictionary
I didn't expect it to solve all my problems, but I was most disappointed to learn that it didn't work at all on the Kindle Fire HD, and that you had to use a Paperwhite to be able to use this dictionary.
That was the final straw for me, so I just bought a Kindle Paperwhite. My experience with this has been much better.
Firstly, it solved the dictionary problem. J-E lookups have their pros and cons, but it just works much better. It recognises conjugation now, and also the 々 character, and you can cycle through all definitions of the word, so it has gone from succesfully finding about 40% of the words I looked up (some of which I still couldn't read) to about 90%. It still can't find some words, but if you want to learn to read at speed and in volume that is something you just have to get used to. It is annoying at first, but once you skim over the 1000th word you couldn't read you hardly notice it.
The screen is better too, in that it doesn't reflect and you can read it anywhere. It looks and feels more like reading paper.
The one minus is that the screen is slow to refresh, so when you go the next page there is a noticeable delay. More annoying, when you dictionary look up a word it can take a few seconds to appear. But such is life. Of course, it also has the minus of not being a tablet, so you can't go on the internet, check your emails, listen to music etc. But I didn't want to do any of that stuff, I just bought it to read books in Japanese.
So, overall, I highly recommend the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can't say that I would recommend a Kindle Fire HD. I have been able to read a lot more and a lot quicker in Japanese since I bought it.
Kindle books in Japanese... - sunehiro - 2014-04-12
On Yesasia you can still find Kino no Tabi (and many other light novels, and novels and comics...) with their free shipping promotion.
Just prepare to wait 5 weeks for your books.
Kindle books in Japanese... - NickT - 2014-04-12
rich_f Wrote:So do you still need to use a JP IP address to buy books from the amazon.co.jp store, or have they finally relaxed that policy?I buy my books from a UK IP address and I haven't had any problems so far. Your mileage may vary through, I can't make any promises. I did go through a phase if using a Japanese IP address, to be on the safe side, but I stopped doing that ages ago and it doesn't seem to have made a difference.
Because every time I look for info, I kept running across a "If you download 5 books from a foreign IP, they'll shut you down until you call them" sort of warning, and that sounds like too much trouble for me to want to deal with.
One thing I do have to do though, which is annoying, is keep my amazon account on the Japanese store the whole time. I read both Japanese and English books regularly, but I always buy them from the Japanese store even though the English books are more expensive and the selection isn't always as good. On the plus side though it means I get automatic recommendations for Japanese books which are similar to the ones I am reading in English, which can be interesting sometimes.
I don't think they would take kindly to me re-domiciling my account every other week just so I could buy a book slightly cheaper on a different store. It seems to me that this is the behaviour Amazon object to, rather than just people trying to buy books in a foreign language that aren't available on their own store. Plus it is just too much hassle for me to do it each time, even if they would let me.
Kindle books in Japanese... - kanttuvei - 2014-04-12
NickT Wrote:The final and most major complaint though is that the dictionary is rubbish. It is a J-J dictionary, which is fine, but it just doesn't work very well. It does not recognise the boundaries between words well,I am using the Kindle app on the iPad Air, and the free J-J dictionary is just like NickT describes above so not very useful. I will have to check out if that J-E dictionary will work better and if it works on the app version of Kindle.
<snip>
So, overall, I highly recommend the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can't say that I would recommend a Kindle Fire HD. I have been able to read a lot more and a lot quicker in Japanese since I bought it.
I think that reading on the iPad screen is easy on the eyes, with the good resolution and size it is easy to read from a normal paper reading distance. The J-J dictionary is useful only for checking kanji-compounds. Word boundaries you have to know yourself and Japanese names will not be found. There are no screen refresh issues with the iPad.
I have not used or seen a Kindle device, so cannot compare it to the iPad. IP address does not seem to matter when buying the books, because I can also buy them from behind the company proxy which is not in Japan.
Kindle books in Japanese... - JapaneseRuleOf7 - 2014-04-12
NickT Wrote:So, overall, I highly recommend the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can't say that I would recommend a Kindle Fire HD. I have been able to read a lot more and a lot quicker in Japanese since I bought it.Thanks much. Reading more and quicker is high on my list of stuff I'd like to do, so your review was very helpful.
I'm in Japan, so it's no problem to buy books (either on Amazon or made from trees). The only thing I need to figure out is if I really want to spend over a hundred bucks to read books. Guess I'm just being cheap.
Anyway, thanks for that.
Kindle books in Japanese... - TsugiAshi - 2014-04-12
JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Are libraries an option?NickT Wrote:So, overall, I highly recommend the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can't say that I would recommend a Kindle Fire HD. I have been able to read a lot more and a lot quicker in Japanese since I bought it.Thanks much. Reading more and quicker is high on my list of stuff I'd like to do, so your review was very helpful.
I'm in Japan, so it's no problem to buy books (either on Amazon or made from trees). The only thing I need to figure out is if I really want to spend over a hundred bucks to read books. Guess I'm just being cheap.
Anyway, thanks for that.
Kindle books in Japanese... - JapaneseRuleOf7 - 2014-04-12
TsugiAshi Wrote:Absolutely. And I have no problem shelling out 1000 yen at the bookstore either. But where a Kindle would really shine is where it gives the reading of kanji, similar to how Rikaichan works.JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Are libraries an option?NickT Wrote:So, overall, I highly recommend the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can't say that I would recommend a Kindle Fire HD. I have been able to read a lot more and a lot quicker in Japanese since I bought it.Thanks much. Reading more and quicker is high on my list of stuff I'd like to do, so your review was very helpful.
I'm in Japan, so it's no problem to buy books (either on Amazon or made from trees). The only thing I need to figure out is if I really want to spend over a hundred bucks to read books. Guess I'm just being cheap.
Anyway, thanks for that.
Reading Japanese online with Rikaichan is a breeze, and if I could get that same functionality with a book, I think I'd be in heaven. Well, that plus a beer and a girlfriend to cook me dinner. But I'd settle for just getting kanji lookups.
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2014-04-17
@NickT Thanks for the info. I have an Amazon US account with a ton of books on it, and my Amazon JP account uses the same email address. So if I change the email address on one of them, it shouldn't be an issue. I just have to get another Kindle Paperwhite.
Kindle books in Japanese... - NickT - 2014-04-18
That might work. If you have never linked your accounts in the first place then that would definitely be fine, but I'm not sure how easy it is to de-link them once linked.
I imagine it is a hassle though having to carry two devices, part of the beauty of it is that I can carry one kindle, read in Japanese, and then when I get tired switch to an English book, and vice versa.
I wonder if there are any devices where you can easily 'switch users' on Kindle, so that you can use multiple accounts? It doesn't seem to be possible on the paperwhite or Fire HD but maybe you can do it on an Android tablet or something.
If anyone has any success I'd be interested to know how they did it.
Kindle books in Japanese... - Splatted - 2014-04-18
You can root nooks (and likely other e-readers) and turn them in to android tablets then install the kindle app (and other e-reader apps) on them. Not sure whether that would actually achieve the desired aim in this case but some people would consider it worth doing anyway...
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2014-05-12
So I dug out my old Motorola Xoom, wiped the Kindle app, changed my amazon.co.jp email address, and it sort of worked, but it won't let me buy books on the JP Kindle store. Not even free ones. Not quite sure what the deal is with that. There's no "buy" button. It just says it's unavailable. And that goes for any books in the JP Kindle store.
Any ideas?
Kindle books in Japanese... - Splatted - 2014-05-12
@rhich_f: I think you have to claim a Japanese residential address with your amazon jp account.
Kindle books in Japanese... - RawToast - 2014-05-12
You can use http://www.tenso.com/en/ to get a Japanese address without resorting to making one up.
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2014-05-12
Hmm... I have a JP address as one of my addresses, and have shipped to it before. I'll take a look and see if I have something set wrong.
EDIT: AH! Figured it out. I have to set my JP address to my one-click address. Woot.
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2014-05-15
So I've been using the Kindle app for a few days, and it's good, but the dictionary is, as NickT points out, rubbish. Thanks for the info about the Kindle Fire, too. I'm going to order a Paperwhite and have it shipped over here, and install a better dictionary. (I've used Tenso every now and then, and they really come in handy for things like this.)
One interesting bit: the Japanese Paperwhite has 4GB of storage (3.1 usable) vs. 2GB (1.1) in the US/NA model.
EDIT: Well, that was nasty. Amazon flat-out cancelled my Paperwhite order (and everything else in it.) Shipping address was Tokyo, billing was US.
It was one of those automated, "If you order one of these again, we'll close your account for good" things, too. I guess that's that.
Kindle books in Japanese... - visualsense - 2014-05-15
Just a warning, some (well, one at least) kindle ebooks in the Amazon JP store may come as packed scans (like manga) instead of just text.
Better check (file size or sending a sample) before buying any JP book thinking you will be able to use the inline dict...
Kindle books in Japanese... - visualsense - 2014-05-15
BTW, I'm outside Japan, first time I bought a buncha ebooks in the Amazon JP site it did give me a warning and locked my account (did not let buy anymore).
Then I used a VPN to download the books (just to be safe), and thought "well at least I have some nice study material for a while".
After a week I checked and the account was not locked anymore.
Never gave me a warning again even though I never bothered to use the VPN again.
I think it was when I registered my Paperwhite that triggered the warning, and then downloading through the VPN logged a Japanese IP with my account which is enough to satisfy whatever deal Amazon made with the JP publishers.
Kindle books in Japanese... - rich_f - 2014-05-16
Oh, I had no trouble buying Kindle books outside of Japan on my Japanese Kindle account. No warnings, nothing. I have a Japanese address on the account, so I guess that was good enough for them when I was buying Kindle books.
But I got an automated warning letter immediately when I tried to buy a Paperwhite and have it shipped to my Tenso address in Tokyo.
Now I don't want to buy anything in particular for Kindle, because I'm not sure what will happen. So annoying.
I shouldn't have to set up alternate addresses, VPNs, or any of that stuff. I just want some bits that happen to be encoded in Japanese instead of English. Why do they have to make it so hard to do this legit?