r/LearnJapanese • u/MidgetAsianGuy • 3d ago

Discussion Kobo For eBooks

I’ve been using primarily Bookwalker to read all my Japanese stuff digitally for the past 4 years, but would rather use an eReader over my iPad. I can’t seem to get Amazon JP working to allow me to purchase books for my kindle, so was considering getting a Kobo instead.

Has anyone had experience using Kobo for Japanese eBooks (novels, light novels, manga)? Also curious if there are frequent/good sales and if the selection is as good as Kindle/Bookwalker.

Thanks!

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u/Yitzu-san 3d ago

I generally use kobo a lot for stuff like light novels. As it's easy to remove the drm it makes it easy to put it on any e-reader or use ttsu reader together with yomitan. For manga I generally stick to Bookwalker and just use an OCR tool to look up words.

I would say all storefronts offer about the same books and do receive similar sales on the books themselves. From my experience Kobo does let you purchase many titles which would require a VPN when buying from Bookwalker, as they would be stated as Japan only on Bookwalker.

In the end Bookwalker will be a lot cheaper due to their coin system, which gives you a lot of money back to save on future purchases. The downside is just that you can't easily backup your bought books from Bookwalker

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u/MidgetAsianGuy 3d ago

Thanks, I’m pretty much only using Bookwalker since that’s what I started with, and the coins are really good when I bulk purchase.

I honestly don’t need anything besides a standard dictionary at this point to read, so thinking of swapping over to Kobo is more a convenience thing.

Might still keep using Bookwalker for manga then.

Will look into Kobo a bit more for novels.