Is there an easy way to convert novels which are in picture form (png, jpeg, etc) to text (.txt for example)? Does software exist that can do this? If not, are there any good sources of text novels. My main interest is light novels, but any sort of literature would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

There are definitely different kinds of software out there that can read text off of an image, but aside from that you can find a lot of older texts at: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

It's like the Gutenberg project for Japanese basically

http://www.nyaa.eu/ search for 一般小説
rutracker.org/

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid121590

The software: OCR, eg. ABBYY Fine Reader

Search for 一般小説・TXT詰め合わせ it's a 2GB file that's floating around with 5000 or so txt novels (new and old). You can see the contents list here (although it might not be complete):

http://www.douban.com/note/178235823/