So I was looking for the ability to read Japanese books online and I found several sites which sell Japanese ebooks. The ebooks are actually quite cheap... One part of 壬生義士伝 for example costs like.. 500 yen.

Here's a few sites:
インプレスジャパン ダイレクト http://direct.ips.co.jp/book/impressjapan.cfm
ウェブの書斎 http://www.shosai.ne.jp/
電子書店パピレス http://www.papy.co.jp/
BitwayBooks http://books.bitway.ne.jp/
PDAbook http://pdabook.jp/pdabook/
楽天ダウンロード http://dl.rakuten.co.jp/book/
SpaceTownブックス http://books.spacetown.ne.jp/sst/

Now to the problem: The formats are wierd. There are two common formats: dotBook and XMDF. Both can be used on Windows if you have the needed software (neither work on Linux ). But the main problem is, you can't copy and paste form them >_<.

For XMDF, a program called bunkoviewer by sharp is used. It has quite a lot of settings and such, so reading the books is quite nice. Several sites have "立ち読み" options where you can read the beginning of books for free. There is only one problem: Copying text from the viewer works... it just isn't pasteable! As you past the text, it becomes crap.

This is what comes out if I copy 五月 from a book: ŒÜŒŽ

So I was mainly wondering if other people has tried stuff like this and if they have solutions or advice. It seems like a great resource if things would work properly.

500 yen is 'quite cheap' ? That's almost the price of a brand new book, in paper.

wccrawford Wrote:500 yen is 'quite cheap' ? That's almost the price of a brand new book, in paper.

壬生義士伝 costs like three times that amount on amazon.jp, and that's not even including shipping which is extremely expensive.