Please ask Japanese Publisher to make their e-book available outside of Japan.

hiroto

Noticed the topic - How to Buy JP Digital e-Books.

In long term, true way of buying JP e-books should be through your local e-book storefront.

Please read this.

Hosikuzu

Setting your account to access the Japanese kindle store is pretty trivial (once you actually know how to do it), and there are a huge number of books available on Bookwalker's Japanese store too, which isn't region restricted and offers a large number of payment options.

I mean with all due respect Bookwalker's app and DRM do suck, but those alone aren't reasons to claim that the books themselves are inaccessible. And they run so many goddamn coinback and sale promotions that not only are the books accessible, they're often dirt cheap too.

hiroto

@hosikuzu said in Please ask Japanese Publisher to make their e-book available outside of Japan.:

Japanese kindle store is pretty trivial

If you lie to them about your home address.

Also, you would need separate device for JP kindle reading and non-JP kindle reading.

Also, you need VPN to fake your IP address to be in Japan otherwise your Kindle download will be blocked after a few downloads.

I tried it, and with all those issues, I concluded it is not something I want to pursue.

Farmerdad

@hiroto said in Please ask Japanese Publisher to make their e-book available outside of Japan.:

In long term, true way of buying JP e-books should be through your local e-book storefront.

It's a business decision. For the same reason, many US books (and videos) are not available through the same outlets in other countries. Publishers license distributors in the other regions to distribute their books. If the original publisher were to not region lock their store fronts, they would be damaging the relationship with the contracted distributors. When I was I was in Europe selling books for this one publisher, it was before the Internet was a thing but if the company started shipping individual book orders into "my area" it would have upset me. They were taking away from my sales. They sent those people to me to sell them a book.

D

Serah

Aside from license issues, the profit margin is also affected by the different taxes and put on fees. I absolutely would not mind, if there is something like a digital retailer in Japan who sells them towards Europeans. But taxes and laws make it very hard, unless the company is shady and often considered a rip off/fake shop/giving reason to complain.

A lot of Chinese retailers are selling very low quality stuff under a UK banner, making a lot of people complain over here for getting fraud products or very low quality stuff overpriced. If a retailer is serious with their business in offering service to foreign countries, they have to accept the laws. Considering European laws are quite strict and very customer friendly, even a lot of U.S. businesses have retreat from the European market for less - like with the GDPR story recently.

Assuming a Japanese publisher sets up a local storefront over here, it would not suffice. The profit margin is realistically pushed towards hard negative by all the stuff around it which are needed to establish and secure the position - like lawsuits, patents and so on.

Therefore I have an understanding why oversea companies keep their distant towards each other. What is needed is - in my opinion - is less an appeal towards the Japanese (original) companies, but rather towards our governments to able more free trade in that sector. It is not an easy task, though. Especially when it comes to cultural differences.

hiroto

@serah said in Please ask Japanese Publisher to make their e-book available outside of Japan.:

Assuming a Japanese publisher sets up a local storefront over here, it would not suffice.

I'm not expecting them to do that. Just asking for them to use international distributor.

TO Book doesn't seems to have any issue distributing their kindle books in every single European local Amazon store front.

Serah

@hiroto that seems true. Though I expect that is the case where licensing is an issue. I remember I have had that issue with The Walking Dead comics.

First time I got into them, I bought the original U.S. versions via amazon.de. But they became unavailable for me the moment a German version was announced and then put up for sale. Only recently they got back up on sale again - with a much higher price.

I think the localiser have a high interest in preventing the distribution of the same book for cheaper, despite it comes in a different language.

It would be helpful and very interesting if a JNC staff member with more insight to the licensing stuff etc. can give an insight to that special case of the Ascendance of a Bookworm title.

DoomerX

I bought an ebook from Amazon.jp a couple weeks ago. Granted I still have a Japanese address still listed on my account from when I stayed there. I don't know if that makes a difference. Though I tried a year or two ago and they wouldn't let me even buy an ebook since my IP was from the US. Don't know if they had a policy change since then. I haven't tried opening it with on anything other than the Windows Kindle Reader. I didn't use any proxies or VPNs to buy or read the book. I'm leaning towards having a dedicated device for my Japanese books, but that may be unnecessary.

hiroto

@doomerx said in Please ask Japanese Publisher to make their e-book available outside of Japan.:

I bought an ebook from Amazon.jp a couple weeks ago. Granted I still have a Japanese address still listed on my account from when I stayed there. I don't know if that makes a difference. Though I tried a year or two ago and they wouldn't let me even buy an ebook since my IP was from the US. Don't know if they had a policy change since then. I haven't tried opening it with on anything other than the Windows Kindle Reader. I didn't use any proxies or VPNs to buy or read the book. I'm leaning towards having a dedicated device for my Japanese books, but that may be unnecessary.

They allow for access from non Japanese IP address to certain degrees, because they don't want to block out Japanese customer who happened to be traveling abroad. But consecutive purchase from non Japanese IP address will eventually get blocked until you access it from Japanese address again.

Many people work around that with VPN. I just don't want to risk spending my money on ebook bought like that because it definitely goes against Amazon policy and they have ability to wipe out my kindle books.