I'd like to read some light novels now that I'm done with RTK, but since I'm not in Japan, it's not very practical for me to buy the actual books (no idea how long it takes for them to ship). So I was thinking of buying some e-Ink based ebook reader that supports Japanese, and then just buying ebooks for it (instant gratification, that's the ticket). The problem is I have no idea which reader to get that supports Japanese ebooks and is available in the US, and I pretty much failed to find any Japanese sites that sell ebooks for such readers. Of course, my Japanese isn't good enough to google in Japanese with confidence, so I might be missing something obvious.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has tried anything like this and can point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Amazon still doesn't have a Japanese Kindle store.
(http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04...-says.html)

Sony and Panasonic both scrapped their e-readers in Japan.
Apparently, most electronics books in Japan are via mobile phone.

There are sites on the web where you can download light novels and manga (although
it might not be legal) for free. Some are probably in Japanese.

So you could download raw manga and light novels and put them on your e-reader.

The iPad would be good for that since there are so many apps for manga(CloudReaders is my favorite) and PDF readers (iAnnotate is my favorite).

In the article, it says the ebook market in Japan might be 4 times the size of the US.
Too bad the Kindle store hasn't set up shop in Japan yet.

The nice thing about the iPad is that you have the iBooks app(Apple), Kindle app (Amazon), and NOOK app (Barnes and Noble). So you can access all the major e-book
stores on one device.

Somewhere on this forum is a totally innocent thread about nihongo books.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5048

The links in that innocent thread don't seem to work anymore (i.e. they now point to something else). I'm guessing there's a time limit on how long URL's can be redirected. Were there OCRed study materials available there? I'd love to get my hands on some.

As for readers, I guess something can always be worked out, even if it involves buying an iPad, but the question about where to get ebooks is still open. I'm aware of all those light novel scans out there, but the problem is that they're not OCRed, you can't read them well on a typical reader with a smallish screen and lack of zoom (or very slow and frustrating zoom). I was hoping to get real Japanese ebooks, where you can change font size, where the text flows vertically right to left, and furigana is included. Do they have something like this in Japan at least for cell phones? What format do they use?

I'm guessing you don't quite understand what "totally innocent" implies. If they redirect somewhere else, then you're doing it wrong, quite possibly.

Yeah, I figured it out. I was reading too quickly, and didn't expect that level of sneaky innocence.

Although I'm still interested in finding out if there are official Japanese light novel ebooks available somewhere, and what you need to use to read them.

If there are official ebooks out there, they're hiding them very well.

Kindle seems to be getting a lot of publicity on Amazon.co.jp (i.e. large ads in the middle of the homepage, though most of the links go to Amazon.com), and there are a whole lot of Japanese books about Kindle and "電子書籍", so my guess is that ebooks are just around the corner, though the low price and portability of 文庫本 may be an obstacle to the adoption of ebooks in Japan.

Asriel Wrote:I'm guessing you don't quite understand what "totally innocent" implies. If they redirect somewhere else, then you're doing it wrong, quite possibly.

I dont get it - how do those random url strings relate to actual web addresses? someone give dumb old me a hint..

EDIT: OH, i just got it..how sneaky, lol.

cmertb Wrote:The links in that innocent thread don't seem to work anymore (i.e. they now point to something else). I'm guessing there's a time limit on how long URL's can be redirected. Were there OCRed study materials available there? I'd love to get my hands on some.

As for readers, I guess something can always be worked out, even if it involves buying an iPad, but the question about where to get ebooks is still open. I'm aware of all those light novel scans out there, but the problem is that they're not OCRed, you can't read them well on a typical reader with a smallish screen and lack of zoom (or very slow and frustrating zoom). I was hoping to get real Japanese ebooks, where you can change font size, where the text flows vertically right to left, and furigana is included. Do they have something like this in Japan at least for cell phones? What format do they use?

Light novels look awesome on my iPad. It all depends on the quality of the scans.
At full screen, everything is perfectly readable (even furigana).

I don't know of many E-Readers aside from the new Kindle that support Asian text. I think the Japanese are just starting to get into the E-reading market. (They tried a while back and failed quite miserably from my understanding.) I agree with JimmySeal, my Guess is if you give it another year or so and you should start seeing more Ebooks from Japan.

Project Gutenberg has some old Japanese reading.
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/ja

Oh and, 一般小説 is a good search term if your looking in the right places.

I have a Sharp Brain electronic dictionary which has the option of downloading ebooks from the Sharp website. I'm not sure if those are able to be viewed on anything else though.

If you're also in need of an electronic dictionary, I do highly recommend those though.

[Katsuo]

Sharp have a new device in the pipeline: Today's Mainichi.

Wow. Nice to see an Android-based e-reader in the Japanese market.
From launch, they will have 30,000 books, magazines, etc. in their store.

And the 10.8 inch reader has a 1366x800 resolution.

Would be very nice for reading light novels (which flow vertically)
and so those extra 300 vertical pixels will come in handy.

My advice would be to at least wait until the end of the year.
The tablet wars have just started and there will be tons of iPad-like devices
coming out in the next few months.

Hopefully more will be released in Japan.

(Links below all japanese)

I've bought from:
http://www.franken.com/enter.html

A set of links to other sites:
http://www.booknet.co.jp/elebook/d-book2.htm

Or you could buy books used on amazon and have them turned into PDFs for a nominal fee:
http://hbk.s1.bindsite.jp/

Or:
Set your google search language to japanese and search on '電子書籍'. Pay careful attention to file formats, as most sellers are kind of d-baggy about DRM. Franken's DRM could probably be gotten around with a program called "Unlocker", hypothetically, if you were into that sort of thing. Whether the books they sell will interest you (mostly romance/bl type stuff I think) I couldn't say.

I would try aozora bunko
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/
It's full of Japanese classics (novels etc.) for free. Obviously you won't find the most recent things.
Good luck

honto (yeah, it's officially lower-cased, apparently) has all sorts of ebooks available on their site. You don't know how happy I am to get the instant gratification of buying and downloading books on there, without having to deal with shipping costs, etc.

Do note, though, that you need the appropriate viewer for whatever book you end up buying. I can direct you to a viewer for xmdf (.zbf) ebooks, which I've included below. Unfortunately that format is Windows-only from what I gather, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. For .book, I believe you need to install T-Time, which I haven't gotten working yet on my computer (apparently it's both a ebook viewing program and an internet plug-in).

honto's site:

http://hon-to.jp/contents/StaticPage.do?html=index

Place to download ebook viewer for xmdf ebooks:

http://books.spacetown.ne.jp/sst/menu/xm...windl.html

T-Time (.book ebooks -- the same makers also did Crochet, which is specific to manga-viewing, if I remember correctly. Haven't gotten Crochet to work, either):

http://www.voyager.co.jp/

I was able to register with honto's site with my gmail account -- it was pretty simple after that (had trouble using my yahoo mail account, for some reason). They accepted my credit card, and afterward I went to my account's download list to get my purchase.

Other sites of interest:

http://www.voyager.co.jp/dotbook/links.html

This is a list of sites that use T-Time -- essentially, these are other places you are likely to find other ebooks and manga.

スラッシュドット・ジャパンによると
「海外の良質なSF作品を日本語訳して出版しているハヤカワ書房が、「ハヤカワ文庫SF総解説2000」を刊行する。
　ハヤカワ文庫SFが通巻2000番を迎えたことを記念して刊行されるもので、番号順にすべての作品を紹介・解説するもの。ただし「SFマガジン」誌上での特集をまとめたものということで、内容は基本的にはそのままのようだ（Amazonのカスタマーレビュー参照）。」

こちらすべての作品が見えるように並べたものです。