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By the way, if anyone's interested in buying Japanese eBooks, my current go-to store is Kobo (owned by Rakuten): https://books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/ https://boo

By the way, if anyone's interested in buying Japanese eBooks, my current go-to store is Kobo (owned by Rakuten): https://books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/ https://books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/ The biggest differentiator for them is they don't compress their images to oblivion like Amazon and Google Play does, which is really nice for light novels and manga where image quality makes a huge difference. Being Kobo, they also happen to be the only eBook store other than Amazon to offer their own line of eBook reader devices, most of which can be hacked to use a bigger sdcard for more storage (they literally use an sdcard for internal storage instead of emmc). Of course, their DRM is easily crackable, but I would love to hear recommendations for DRM free Japanese eBook stores if anyone is aware of any.

ninjin 8y ago
I was happily surprised to find at least some of the manga (my Japanese is not good enough for light novels just yet) series that I read (or have read) on Kobo. My previous impression was that every publisher was pushing their own application and/or online store with DRM from hell. Unfortunately they seem to price digital editions the same as new physical copies (about JPY 600, which is ~USD 5.50), even for volumes that are well over a decade old. Thus I will probably stick to my current strategy of browsing the Book Off JPY 100 (plus JPY 8 tax) section and carry on reading physical copies as I rarely read the latest stuff anyway – still, wonderful to know that one has an option when you are out of the country. Lastly, bonus points to Kobo in that they appear to run campaigns with a free selection of manga volumes at the moment to get you hooked on a number of series.
- throwitallaway8 8y ago
  Literally the only thing I miss from Bookwalker is their sales. They frequently have sales of 50% off + 30%+ cashback (mostly on Kadokawa published books, but sometimes from other publishers as well), which fueled a lot of my past impulse purchases that I've now come to regret. The best I've seen so far on Kobo has been a 30% off coupon that requires a 10k yen minimum purchase. If you're price sensitive then used physical books is probably still the way to go. I couldn't recommend Bookwalker in good faith to anyone until their DRM becomes trivial to break, because if they pull what Microsoft pulled here all of your purchased eBooks would disappear without any possibility for recourse.

ninjin 8y ago

I was happily surprised to find at least some of the manga (my Japanese is not good enough for light novels just yet) series that I read (or have read) on Kobo. My previous impression was that every publisher was pushing their own application and/or online store with DRM from hell. Unfortunately they seem to price digital editions the same as new physical copies (about JPY 600, which is ~USD 5.50), even for volumes that are well over a decade old. Thus I will probably stick to my current strategy of browsing the Book Off JPY 100 (plus JPY 8 tax) section and carry on reading physical copies as I rarely read the latest stuff anyway – still, wonderful to know that one has an option when you are out of the country. Lastly, bonus points to Kobo in that they appear to run campaigns with a free selection of manga volumes at the moment to get you hooked on a number of series.

throwitallaway8 8y ago
Literally the only thing I miss from Bookwalker is their sales. They frequently have sales of 50% off + 30%+ cashback (mostly on Kadokawa published books, but sometimes from other publishers as well), which fueled a lot of my past impulse purchases that I've now come to regret. The best I've seen so far on Kobo has been a 30% off coupon that requires a 10k yen minimum purchase. If you're price sensitive then used physical books is probably still the way to go. I couldn't recommend Bookwalker in good faith to anyone until their DRM becomes trivial to break, because if they pull what Microsoft pulled here all of your purchased eBooks would disappear without any possibility for recourse.