Hi,

I'm currently looking for more reading material and found that Japanese books are particularly hard to find. 漫画, アニメ, movies, games, old books - easy. But recent authors, like 村上?
I live in Germany and haven't been able to find a bookstore here. Now, amazon.com has quite a lot English eBooks and it's quite easy to download English or German books, even audio books, or buy used ones. But despite of googling, some 2ch-browsing and so one I still haven't found a Japanese source. (I somewhat doubt they even exist - perhaps used books are so cheap in Japan that no one scans them?)
The only source I've found so far is YesAsia (or importing directly via e.g. amazon.jp), but that gets expensive very fast (and it's not digital - I don't like analog books much).

So, does anyone know a good source?

I use ebook Japan for some of the rarer books, although there's nothing like a paper copy.

http://www.ebookjapan.jp/shop/

Analog books!

You are true product of the digital era!

On another site somebody mentioned that he had found "The melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi" as a well formatted ebook. So there are probably people who scan these books. And/Or OCR them. I've found a that book as a *.txt file, so there should be a source somewhere. I've acquired quite a lot of Japanese books that I have yet to read. There was a time when I just had these books to motivate me with studying Japanese. After RTK the time has come to read these.

I'd love to find an ebook version for Norwegian Woods to complement my analog book ;D Looking up words just takes too much time.

watashimo Wrote:I'd love to find an ebook version for Norwegian Woods to complement my analog book ;D Looking up words just takes too much time.

There's a Chinese Japanese learning forum that has this, plus a few other Murakami books. I'm not sure what the forum policy is on linking copyrighted material, though. If you email me I can send you the link. They also have a scanned (non OCRd) Haruhi book, but not the first one (涼宮ハルヒの憤慨). I have the first one in hardcopy but I'd kill for a txt formatted version.

I hope there's no policy against linking to copyrighted material, otherwise every link to any web page not explicitly in the public domain or consisting exclusively of non-creative material would be in violation of the policy.

~J, making a copyrighted post

Fair enough, I just don't want to get involved in the debates that seem to constantly crop up on the subject.

http://coffeejp.com/bbs/forumdisplay.php...&typeid=34

Norwegian Wood is near the top.

Thanks, very nice. Now I'm even getting my scans from the Chinese... ^^

Now that's a great site. Anybody interested in creating parallel versions of Japanese novels?

A lot of novels seem to be attached on the mofile site. Is mofile kind of a Chinese rapidshare? Looks like a social networking site where people share their files. Do I need to register there to download the files?

BTW, I have all Haruhi novels as *.txt files. If you email me, I can send you the files.

I've just registered succesfully on the coffeejp site (took me over thirty minutes with perapera kun. Reason enough to study Chinese down the road).

But I still have to figure out how to download files from mofile. Anybody willing to help me?

I've figured out that the number in:

提取码：
5061374922204803

is the code to download the file. In the next window I get this:

(一般小説) [木藤亜也] 1リットルの涙.rar

文件大小： 13.87M 提供者：shousetsu2 [ 浏览该用户其它文件 ] [ 免责声明 ]

When I click on [ 浏览该用户其它文件 ] I get to another window, which looks like a shared files folder. With the exception that there are no files to download.

Okay, I just found out that there's a button called "English".

Now I've ran into another problem. Most files won't be displayed properly on my computer. I've found a tool to convert shift-jis files to UFT-8 (Unifier trial version). Anybody knows of a freeware tool do do this?

watashimo Wrote:Now I've ran into another problem. Most files won't be displayed properly on my computer. I've found a tool to convert shift-jis files to UFT-8 (Unifier trial version). Anybody knows of a freeware tool do do this?

iconv -f SHIFT-JIS -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt

shakkun Wrote:They also have a scanned (non OCRd) Haruhi book, but not the first one (涼宮ハルヒの憤慨). I have the first one in hardcopy but I'd kill for a txt formatted version.

watashimo Wrote:BTW, I have all Haruhi novels as *.txt files. If you email me, I can send you the files.

Could you guys please send me these? I tried registering at the Chinese forum but even with Rikaichan I couldn't do it. It seems like I registered, but I didn't receive an email confirmation and I can't login.
I would like to read these novels and maybe sentence-mine portions of it and considering there's an English translation available on the net, it would be a great reading resource. Again, if you would please do me the favor of sending them, it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

@radical_tyro: Thanks, I'm going to try it out.

With regards to the Haruhi novels, I've received quite a lot of requests for these. I guess we have many Haruhi worshippers here. It doesn't make a lot of sense to send it out per email, so I'll upload these as a torrent tomorrow.

Wow, I have to admit I hadn't really explored that forum beyond the threads with Japanese titles. They have 1リットルの涙? I tried to register but I couldn't even get the verification code image to show up. I might try it again at Uni when I have Chinese speaking friends on hand.

watashimo Wrote:With regards to the Haruhi novels, I've received quite a lot of requests for these. I guess we have many Haruhi worshippers here. It doesn't make a lot of sense to send it out per email, so I'll upload these as a torrent tomorrow.

Awesome! That would be great, thanks. I found them on WinMX a while ago but only in scanned image format. Being able to c+p would be a godsend for sentence picking.

Okay, took me some time, but I've finally uploaded the Haruhi novels on the piratebay. I'm not sure if linking to torrent sites is allowed, so just browse through the ebook section. It should stay on the first page for a few days. Name of the torrent: Suzumiya Haruhi novels [jap]

As for the Haruhi files...I'm not very computer savvy when it comes to technical things. I tried open one file in Open Office, and it was all numbers and symbols.

Awesome, thanks. My upload speed is nothing amazing but it's a small file, so I'll leave it going for a few weeks.

I'm having the same issue myself, actually. I sent one of the files to a friend, and he was able to view it, and he saved it in PDF format which let me see it as well.. but if I copy out of it, anything I paste it into displays gibberish as well.
And the image links are in HTML, which is even more confusing in a .txt file XD

Download Babelpad and open the *.txt files as Shift-JIS. Then save the files as UTF8 files.

Edit: You don't have to download babelpad, notepad can save UTF-8 files. So save all the files as UTF-8 and you can open them in openoffice.

I just opened them with Microsoft word as plain old Unicode, then saved them. They seem to work fine, everything shows up and I can copy and paste to other programs without it turning back into gibberish.

To actually answer the original question of how to get Japanese books, use http://www.bk1.com. It's all in Japanese-- there's NO English support available, but with Rikaichan enabled, you should be able to figure it out. The shipping options are pretty good, too. 5 different ways to have stuff shipped in varying levels of expense. I ordered 7 books for 4100 yen, and shipping via SAL was only 1900, with none of the stupid handling charges you get from amazon.co.jp. If I had ordered from Amazon, shipping would have been 2700+2100= 4800 yen JUST for shipping and handling. bk1 doesn't charge handling fees that I know of, anyway.

The shipping options I saw were EMS (most expensive), some sort of expedited special delivery (not sure about this one), SAL (fast, but not as fast or expensive as EMS), 航空便 or　船便 if you don't mind waiting for it... 航空便 takes about 7-10 days to the US. I don't know about Germany. 船便 takes about 8-10 weeks to the US... it's totally cheap, but insanely sloooow.

bk1 also gives you points for purchases that you can apply to other stuff. I haven't looked into that too much yet.

Actually, http://www.bk1.com is an unregistered domain.

I think you meant:

http://www.bk1.jp/

(^_^)

Yeah, my bad on that.

Here's an actual functioning link to a postage rate calculator for Japan Post in English:

http://www.post.japanpost.jp/cgi-charge/...p?lang=_en

You can find out how long/how much it will cost to have your stuff sent over. BK1 does *not* include shipping estimates, it will give you a shipping number when the package actually ships. For my 1900 grams worth of 7 books, it would have cost 4000 yen for EMS, 2700 for Airmail, 1900 for SAL, and 1000 for surface (approximately.)

Delivery estimates to the US are 4 days for EMS, 6 for air, 10-14 for SAL, and 8-10 weeks for surface.

Still a hell of a lot cheaper than amazon.