Anyone have experience with E-Readers?

Japanese
#1

I have used a few e-readers in my time, mostly Kobo, but I recently switched to a Boox Note 2, that is running windows 9. Usually I read on my phone, and have never had an issue on there, but it seems like there is a huge lack of apps that can display japanese books correctly.

The closest I have found is Moonreader. Moonreader is the only app that displays furigana correctly, but the dictionary functions are terrible, images do not size correctly (for light novels etc), and the text is horizontal instead of vertical.

Does anybody know of an application that I am maybe overlooking that displays everything correctly?

Note - I usually use google books (on my phone), which reads and displays everything correctly. But that is only for books that I have purchased from google, nothing else.

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#2

Amazon Kindle?
Probably that will be the most convenient… Just because it would be possible to buy Japanese eBooks and use the build in Amazon Kindle eBook Reading functions (highlighting words, dictionary etc which are really good).

Something that I have not tried is Honto. It is a proper bookstore which has an ebook store too. There is a phone app, desktop app and I think you can read through the web browser. It’s all in Japanese.

I mostly read in on my phone or 2in1 laptop in tablet mode (or buy physical books through CDJapan). This is why I just use Bookwalker so that I can buy with one account in English and in Japanese and have it all synced between my phone / web browser.

For Honto / Bookwalker / Booklive / eBookJapan all the text and images should appear properly.
Bookwalker, Booklive and eBookJapan all have phone apps + you can read in the web browser. However you are locked in their “ecosystem”…

Hope this kinda helps.

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#3

They work, but I am avoiding them for the same reason I am avoiding Google Books. You can only view books that you have bought on that particular platform. You can’t search your device to read files ‘not’ purchased in that platform.

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#4

Not technically true - you can send your own files to your kindle reader/apps. They just can’t be drm protected and they have to have the right format (not epub), so if you bought a book somewhere else you might have to convert it first.
It’s a bit of a hassle because of that, and because you can’t open them directly, there’d be the extra step of having to transfer the file to your kindle library each time.

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#5

Perhaps amazon is a little better suited to handing this. I’ll look into it. I tried doing this exact thing with play books , but I wasn’t able to keep any of the books in their folders while transferring, so just ended up with a jumbled mess of like 1500 books :rofl:

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#6

Honto doesn’t allow web browser view unless it’s a new function since I last used it. It’s pretty barebone with highlight, note taking, google search functions, 3-font, vertical/horizontal readings options, not possible to add a dictionary. I literally OCR my ebooks from them to control what I buy.

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#7

Thank you very much for this. Didn’t realize / know this about Honto.

1 Like
#8

Looking deeper into moonreader settings, I have been able to get it nearllllly optimized. In miscellaneous settings you can force images to appear fullscreen, so that solved that problem. The only issue remaining is that certain kanji appear gigantic… This could be because the kanji is the header of a paragraph, kinda like a fancy ‘O’, in once upon a time in an old story book. I believe because it is programmed as an image, not a letter, it looks screwy as all heck. Vertical text still doesn’t work, but I can live without that.

#9

I have the same e-reader and I use it for both English and Japanese content.

I’m using KOreader on it to read books and comics and I use Calibre on my computer to manage my library before transferring it with the Android app Calibre companion. Works great.

Not sure about vertical text though.

1 Like
#10

I really should just learn to use calibre. That would probably solve all of my problems, seems it’s the easiest way to make all of your books usable on any target device.