Someone has just offered me a copy of the book 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年 by Haruki Murakami.
This is a translation to French, but I would like to try reading the Japanese version, using the book as "parallel text".
From previous attempts, the best reading experience I got so far was by using the iOS app "Wakaru", which provides far better dictionary lookup than the Kindle paperwhite.

My problem is now to get the Japanese version in either text or pdf format, which can be input into Wakaru.
I am ready to buy a ebook, epub or whatever, since it seems that conversion to pdf is possible. But even this seems to be too much for the publishers: the book in Kindle format is available on the Japanese, and even US sites of Amazon… but not on the French one :-( And it seems that I am not allowed to buy there (unless I use some arcane tricks documented previously on other threads, as I remember)

Can anybody recommend a *simple* way of obtaining a copy?

I can't help you, but I'll link you to Amazon.co.jp: http://tinyurl.com/suwwkamk Hmm, those letters at the end look familiar. I wonder what would happen if you put them at the end of, say, "pastebin.com/"?

I tried to buy a Japanese book but after several days and hours of work I just ended up downloading it. If the publishers don't want my money, that's their problem

This isn't easy but the closest I came to purchasing was using amazon.co.jp. Supposedly if you use a Japanese VPN and have a Japanese address on your account you can buy the ebook. In the end I had 3 amazon accounts (Canadian, American, and Japanese) and when I was logging in I had no friggin idea which one I was using... I ended giving up after several tries, but according to others on the internet it is possible

Good luck!

@Bokusenou: thank you for the hint. Unfortunately, I failed to get what I was looking for there. Broken link, suspicious download of executable, etc. I must admit I am not very good at that.
So, further help would be welcome!

@juniperpansy: I am like you. This kind of situation drives me nuts. I am ready to pay not once but *twice* (actually someone paid for me the first time! ;-) and still have to struggle to get that stuff. It's a shame!

I too gave up on Japanese publishers a long time ago, and spent some effort on alternative ways to get what I need.

I can get you the file Bokusenou hinted from Perfect Dark, which is one excellent way. However due to the nature of the system it will take some time, the amount of which cannot be easily predicted. Depends on how soon I run into suitable peers.

The file in question is marked as Aozora format, which is just plain text with additional formatting/markup codes. You can take advantage of this if you use an app which supports Aozora Bunko files, and there are probably tools to convert it to PDF and common ebook formats. But if you don't care about all that, it's also usable as plain text if you overlook the formatting data (which isn't usually all that much).

Aozokra Bunko is pretty awesome.

There are a huge number of non-copyrighted works in Japanese there, and they are activists for maintaining the death plus 50 rules that allow for free exchange of information

@jmignot I might try the "ul.to" link there before you give up.

I've got it already, sent OP the goods in a private message.

I don't actually want the book (i'm not capable of reading it) but, I end up with corrupted text.
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I just googled it. If I open it in Firefox and change the text encoding to "Japanese (Shift_JIS)" it comes out correctly. If I save that it's still messed up, but if I copy&paste it into a new text file, it works. But is there a way to make it so that it doesn't come out corrupted in the first place? (though i guess it doesn't really matter. i had seen chinese in text files like that before and didn't know what to do. though i suppose i know now.)

qweasdzxc Wrote:I don't actually want the book (i'm not capable of reading it) but, I end up with corrupted text.
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I just googled it. If I open it in Firefox and change the text encoding to "Japanese (Shift_JIS)" it comes out correctly. If I save that it's still messed up, but if I copy&paste it into a new text file, it works. But is there a way to make it so that it doesn't come out corrupted in the first place? (though i guess it doesn't really matter. i had seen chinese in text files like that before and didn't know what to do. though i suppose i know now.)

Yeah that's because files like these are often saved in a ShiftJIS encoding, which just isn't the global norm these days and often not (well) supported by non-Japanese software. Japanese computer users and software manufacturers should hurry up with the adoption of Unicode, which is more practical and widely supported. I can imagine the same goes for Chinese.

What I usually do is open the text file in a good text editor that knows how to handle a wide range of character encodings, then save a copy with UTF-8 encoding.

I have got the file and it opens perfectly in Wakaru.
Ready for hours (days? months?) of comfortable reading…
Thanks so much for helping.