I just ordered a Kindle 3 and found out that you can install your own dictionaries to look up words while reading, but I couldn't find one for Japanese anywhere.

Does anybody know where I could find one in mobipocket format? There are instructions over at mobileread.com how to make one out of a stardict file, but I seem to be unable to do this correctly..

Good question. I've been thinking of getting a Kindle myself lately, and like you, the stardict file conversion didn't work for me, and so I would love to know the answer to this as well.

I'm pretty sure this will work, given the number of other people who have done it successfully. I'll do it tomorrow at work for a japanese dict and post back.

edit: I remembered why I didn't do it before - the kindle's word detection depends on spaces, so it's useless for detecting J words for lookup. We're pretty much stuck with not having a J dict on the kindle. The only way Amazon would make one is if they released the kindle in Japan, which is very unlikely at least in the near future as the Japanese publishing industry is extremely hostile to ebooks.

Hmm, might be possible to hack a Japanese font with a dummy space and code something using a morphological analyzer like MeCab to prep the book with spaces before transfer.

On that subject... If one were to hack a font anyhow, I wonder how hard it'd be to make a Tategaki font, with all the kanji rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Right now for non-Aozora Japanese reading I have to use ChainLP to get that satisfying bunkobon look and feel. It works marvelously well, but no hope for dictionary look-up there, ever.

Blahah Wrote:The only way Amazon would make one is if they released the kindle in Japan, which is very unlikely at least in the near future as the Japanese publishing industry is extremely hostile to ebooks.

I see people use Kindle on the trains for Japanese ebooks all the time (they don't need a dictionary though) and Sony is really pushing with its Reader (ads are everywhere and Yodobashi has a separate stand just for different kinds of Reader), so it can't be that hostile. Ads show both books and manga being available on this medium.

But sure, this is a problem with Kindle that I'd like them to sort out in the next version.

off topic but has anyone gotten the japanese text to display on a kindle? been on tech support for 2 hours..

If you use the PDF-format everything will be displayed correctly.

thank you so much!!

Tolerence91 Wrote:off topic but has anyone gotten the japanese text to display on a kindle? been on tech support for 2 hours..

Works out the box for me.

I had a text file of Japanese Harry Potter - loaded it and works perfectly. Actually that's one of the main reasons I bought a kindle - all Asian fonts are supported by default (unlike for example the Sony Readers, which you have to hack to add new fonts).