E-reader for Japanese?

[mirror]

Hello,

Is there an e-reader available in the United States that displays
Japanese characters?

Thank you.


Paul

[muchan]

> Is there an e-reader available in the United States that displays
> Japanese characters?
>

Since nobody has answered (yet), I post my (incomplete) reply.

Canadian Kobo is bought by owner of Rakuten, and latest version supports Japanese, (and used as the reader for Rakuten books).

Sony's eReader is Japanese made/designed, supporting same ePub format as Kobo,
and used as reader of Sony's ebook shop.

Amazon has started to sell kindle in Japan.

So, major eReaders, at least their latest models, are all capable of showing Japanese texts. But I don't know if they are sold with Japanese fonts in US.
I expect they are (as unicode fonts).
If not, I expect it's possible to install new fonts including Japanese characters.
But I can't tell anything about US market.

muchan

[Arekusu]

1)
I don't know for the US, but I answered he same question in fllj french
newsgroup:

Kobo can read japanese, just change the police to GothicMB101 or Ryumin,
included in the updates.

If it doesn't work, update your software, or eventually look at
http://atouchofkobo.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/260/


2)
A lot of free ebooks in Aozora bunko　青空文庫　
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/index.html

Most of the books are in HTML.
Big books are cut in sections 一　ニ　三　。。。

And you can download Calibre to change the HTML to epub:
http://calibre-ebook.com/

Arekusu

[Scottintokyo]

On 2013-04-15 21:23:17 +0000, mirror said:

> Is there an e-reader available in the United States that displays
> Japanese characters?

The others have given you useful info about some of the dedicated
ereaders out there. The real problem you're likely to encounter, it
seems to me, is obtaining Japanese ebooks. There are a number of
sources of Japanese ebooks here in Japan, including Amazon and the
Apple iBookstore. But licensing restricitons sometimes make it
impossible to purchase Japanese ebooks from the US.

There is Aozora Bunko, which another poster mentioned. One really nice
way to read their books on an iPad is an app called iBunkoHD, which is
available in the US iTunes store
(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibunkohd/id369111608?mt=8). It comes
with a ton of books already loaded and ready to read, and you can add
more from Aozora Bunko yourself. It's a really beautiful app. I
personally like reading ebooks on the iPad, and of course you can do a
lot of other things with it as well. (You can read Amazon ebooks and
ebooks from other sources, for example.) The support for Japanese (as
well as many other languages) is just superb.

I prevoiusly owned a Kindle, and I know that some people prefer the
e-ink screen, but as you can gather from the other posts trying to read
Japanese books on a Kindle or other dedicated ereader in the US really
sounds like a neverending headache.

--
Scottintokyo