Somebody on the wanikani forums a while back linked to this guide to how to do “self clearance” in Canada – you can’t avoid the taxes but you can avoid the courier company fee, apparently, if you’re willing to wrestle the courier firm a bit and then go in person to the relevant government office.
(As a UK resident I am lucky here – books are zero rated for VAT so there’s never any tax to pay and so no extra courier fee either.)
Yeah I actually live in the UK for 5 years and am American, so tax on imported books is kinda surprising to me. Esp books that aren’t published in Canada. But such is life I guess.
Am I allowed to bump this? I’m finding lots of things available to borrow from Open Library that would probably be popular choices for readers here, but I hesitate to add custom “Where to find” links without it being listed as an official provider, or without at least being able to properly title the link and flag it as Free.
Of course! And just @brandon about adding it as an official provider. For free links, use the message button on the book’s page and the link will be marked for you later. (Though I’m this case I assume Brandon would just set it up so all open library links are free anyway.)
A question though- will the catalog change in open library? Like, if I follow a link from this site in a year or two, is there a chance that book will no longer be offered on that site?
It’s possible, but I’d say hopefully unlikely. The catalogue doesn’t rotate or anything – what’s available is stuff that archive.org has preserved with the intention of making accessible for posterity, so having items only available for a limited time would be counter to that.
HOWEVER Open Library is currently in a legal battle with a group of publishers over how they were lending digital books during lockdown (they removed borrowing limits to compensate for the lack of access to physical libraries), which resulted in something like a hundred thousand titles being pulled from the catalogue. I believe those publishers are all American and only English books were pulled, but if the case doesn’t work out in OL’s favour, it could open the door for other publishers to try getting their books removed, too.
OL is officially a library and their catalogue legally SHOULDN’T be under threat from publishers any more than your local library’s is, as long as they don’t change their lending practices again, but time will tell I guess 
@brandon Here’s a description for Open Library if it needs one!
Sorry to triple-post with something that’s only kind of tangential to the Book Providers topic, but I’m curious: Is it possible to add support for Library Extension to book pages? Or is support for Natively something Library Extension would have to be approached to build in on their end (if they even can)? It would be great to be able to see at a glance while browsing Natively if local libraries have whatever book you’re looking at.
And to keep my library obsession more on-topic… I mentioned the Japan Foundation Digital Library for Canada/USA residents a while ago, but avoided suggesting it as an official provider because their Libby catalogue makes it hard to link to individual books. It turns out they also maintain an Overdrive catalogue which is much more consistent on that front (though the links back to JF to apply for a library card are broken…), so it’s not so bad as a provider after all. Though since it’s region-specific and you still have to go through the hoops of applying for a card before you can access the books, it still might be better to just lean on Library Extension for it if possible 
This is super neat. Tagging @brandon for more visibility.
Hey y’all! I just wanted to pop in to say that if you live in the US, you can now buy items from Japan on Mercari. There are tons of Japanese manga volumes available. You can check out their FAQ about this new system here: FAQ for Internationally Shipped Items - Mercari: Your Marketplace
Unfortunately, they’d have to build it on their end. In their FAQs it specifies which websites it works on, so i’m assuming they custom build for those. If you all get more information on something specific I need to surface, happy to do so… but I do surface the isbn/amazon links.
Is it possible to add https://www.audible.com/ as a provider? I know there’s already Amazon Audible & Amazon JP Audible, but some things (like 明日の世界で星は煌めく | L27) are apparently only on the .com version, and there’s no way to filter for them in Natively’s search or books pages (which was frustrating when I was trying to yuri LNs with audiobooks).
For that particular book, it is on Audible but isn’t showing up on Amazon.co.jp: https://www.audible.co.jp/pd/B08DCCHV4Q
I’d wonder if it was a different publisher, but it’s the same cover image so… 
The publisher is listed as 小学館 on both. The copyright year is the same as well
It is also on the Amazon JP Audible, so I added the link. It works as intended (i.e. it can now be found by selecting Audible JP).
Edit: I edited your link so that it formats correctly. But it’s true that it would be less confusing if the audible links also autoformated correctly.
Edit2: Since I was here already, I just added the audiobook.jp link as well.
Thx so much!! Can confirm it works now!
What did you edit it to, to get it to format correctly? In case I have to add something in the future?
I used a private session to access the .com versions, but the idea was to just search on the amazon website directly rather than audible. The amazon link to the audiobook
is automatically detected as an amazon link. You then get a drop down that asks you if it’s kindle or audible (and I selected audible)
Noted. For some reason it just doesn’t appear when I search Amazon JP. Didn’t think to also search .com … I guess that explains why Audible app gave me the .com link, instead of .co.jp like it usually would
What a weird glitch
It showed up on Amazon JP for me, though 
Here, specifically (that’s the link I used to add Audible JP):
The only thing that’s weird is that the page is not connected to the kindle one.
I mean the link works, it just doesn’t appear in search results for me, and even if I search Google I just get .com and Audible JP (plus other providers)
Anyway, it shows properly here now. So that’s good enough for me 
thx again
I noticed that there isn’t a link to the book providers page anywhere unless I find it through this forum thread, is it abandoned in the end?
