Book Providers Megathread (Official Management)

I very rarely buy physical movies or TV shows, but even less inclined to buy Japanese TV shows specifically. The pricing structure is very often absurd, e.g. break a 12 episode season into six 2 episode sets, where each set costs $60.

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@brandon The new book providers feature seems to be creating some duplicates. I submitted feedback for one earlier (that may coincidentally have included an incorrect volume link) and I just saw another one here: ガールズ・ブルー | L29 (both Amazon JP and Amazon US duplicates on that one).

Also, just my personal opinion, but I wouldn’t bother even including Amazon US on the providers list. It’s just so overpriced compared to buying from Japan.

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Ok, I’ve gone through and have removed a lot of duplicates, hopefully you don’t see them anymore. I believe it’s mostly a product of the way I initially ran the automated book provider search process, but have since improved it. We’ll see if it keeps happening.

Fair point. For textbooks & things targeted at learners, it does do ok but yeah almost everything it’s overpriced. I think it’s one of those things where it’s a potential display issue rather than not having it on the site. The ‘natively recommends’ prioritization & favorite providers are a first attempt at addressing this, but as we get more links on the book pages, we may have to do further UI tweaks.

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@brandon So question: is populating book providers completely automated now? Or should we still submit links if they’re missing? For example, stuff on cdJapan, audiobook.jp, or Amazon Audible US. (For that last one, I noticed that 本好き doesn’t list Audible US though it’s got a ton of other links, so I was assuming it’s all automated now.)

If it’s not automated, any chance that could be in the cards, at least for a first-time “this is a new provider, so I’ll scrape them once to see what they’ve got”?

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Good question. No, it is not all automated now. Right now, the only providers i’m automating are shown below, with my confidence in (eventual) automation coverage:

  • Amazon JP, Amazon US, CD Japan, Amazon Kindle JP - High confidence
  • BookWalker, EbookJapan, Honto, Rakuten - Pretty confident
  • Amazon Kindle US, Amazon Audible JP, Amazon Audible US - Low confidence
  • Google Play - Very low confidence

Everything else is user added! For items at low confidence and below, I’d say it’s worthwhile to add. I may try to get audiobook.jp but these audiobooks are a little hard. Basically anything which I can’t use an ISBN for makes it quite difficult… not because I couldn’t find any results via a title search, but it’s hard to grab only the right result.

Eventually, I’ll try to add more sites, we’ll see. Any site which allows isbn search is extremely easy for me to add into the auto process, so let me know if that’s the case.

Edit: As for the status of the current search results, it was a bit bugged the past few days and I didn’t notice :sweat_smile:. Restarted it up just now so those providers will start to be populated again.

Edit 2: We now have book provider search in your libraries!!

Edit 3: @bibliothecary I’m going to try and get ridibooks going this week too, would you be interested in writing up a provider description?? xD

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Music to my ears! :heart_eyes:
Yeah, I’ll write something up. :+1:

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Ridibooks

A retailer specialising in digital products, including ebooks, webtoons, manhwa, and webnovels.

Address: Accessible internationally; no regional restrictions.
Payment: in Won. Offers a selection of payment options including international credit cards. RidiCash is also offered as a way to save money and purchase without having to enter payment information.
Access: Products can only be read using the Ridibooks viewer or app. Some items (usually webtoons) cannot be viewed on PC, only through the app; a warning is shown on items with this restriction before purchase.
Software: The free viewer for PC can be downloaded from the Ridibooks website; the app is available from Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Subscription: Offers a monthly subscription for unlimited reading of novels and magazines.
Notes: No ID verification required unless purchasing adult products.

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Amazing - added! :slight_smile:

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@brandon been wondering about this: why is “print” disabled, and what does “purchase” mean?
image

Edit: it occurs to me after posting that “purchase” may refer to the fact that it’s not free/a subscription…

Edit2:
@brandon bug report. Re-clicking “Select All” on the book search page for My Favorites in the provider section doesn’t de-select them. (Is that a bug? If not, it would make sense to me to de-select them on a re-click.)

Edit3: Possible improvement: filtering by audiobook.jp brings back the 穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ series, which I just added. However, only the first five books have an audiobook version, but Natively displays the full series:

Dunno if there’s any way for Natively to just bring back the specific books marked with audiobooks, but just wanted to mention just in case.

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Feel free to remove this but since we have Amazon JP and Amazon US, is it possible to add the UK Amazon links for books? Or is there still an issue with this?

I live in UK so Amazon is my go to since I can usually get the books cheapest from there without much in the way of postage (mostly free) but I remember being told there was an issue with it before so not sure if they can be added. If there’s still an issue, I’ll just keep using the ISBN if they are displayed.

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i’m just not good at color scheming. It’s not disabled just a lighter gray, as print isn’t a special format, more the default.

Yes.

Yeah I was just lazy. Maybe i’ll improve.

While I see what you’re saying, I think that’s too complicated. People might get confused why the whole series isn’t there…

Please do add Amazon UK links as you see fit! I’d be happy to add into the auto process, but I’d need to apply to their affiliate program first and get 3 sales before I can access their api. So, if you add some links, I’ll apply to the affiliate program and we just need to reach 3 affiliate sales.

Edit: Also, if anyone uses Amazon DE, please do the same! I’ve already applied to their affiliate program, would love to get that API connection up and running… will need it for german.

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Isn’t it more confusing if 18 books are listed in the search results, but you can’t for the life of you find audiobook versions of 15 of those books?

But it’s not an end-of-the-world kind of thing, either; I just wanted to bring the possible UI discrepancy to your attention.

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You are right of course. This isn’t really an issue with other filters as they always apply to all the volumes in the series, rather than just some. Unfortunately, the way search is designed it isn’t really conducive to this proposed UI. I simply ask my search engine for the first x amount of results and tack on series information afterwards… I have no idea how i’d performantly get it to filter the volumes too.

So, since this isn’t a huge deal, but a sizeable technical initiative, it’s probably one that won’t get implemented. Unless we keep adding new filters which would require this behavior. We’ll see.

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I have added 1 link to 本好き (the kindle books are like 5 EUR, which is about 1 EUR cheaper than buying on amazon.jp :flushed:) but it’s not that easy to find Japanese stuff on DE or I am just not good at it. :smiling_face_with_tear:

Edit: found a couple more LNs

I am really surprised that Japanese LNs are generally cheaper in the German Kindle eshop, even with the weak Yen. :flushed: unfortunately, the catalog is limited. :smiling_face_with_tear:

Edit2: I think I made a mistake. I only added kindle links. I think we are supposed to link to the physical stuff, right? :see_no_evil:

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Kindle should be fine! Just be sure to choose the right ‘provider’ where it prompts you as kindle:

Screen Shot 2023-08-19 at 6.24.48 PM

Did you order anything though? I’m not seeing any orders on my affiliate panel yet. I’m only seeing 3 ‘klicks’ :de:

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no, because everything I found, I already own or am not interested in. :smiling_face_with_tear: But I thought, I’d add it in the hopes that maybe someone else might take the bait. :sweat_smile:

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Ah I see, wonderful. :slight_smile:

I’ll say too that if you end up being inspired to buy anything on amazon.de after clicking on my link… well that also helps me.

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Not that I needed anything, but I was curious, so you should see an order now from amazon.de :sweat_smile:

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Haha perfect. Don’t see it quite yet, but let’s give it a little while.

Also, @CatDQ i did the same for amazon.co.uk… so same goes for you :slight_smile:

Once we reach three orders and then we can get approved and start to auto add links.

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Also… @bibliothecary we should start seeing ridibook links appear! Added it to the auto adder.

It’ll be interesting to see how many results it picks up. Basically, I’m only searching ridibooks by our full Natively title and then looking at the first 3 results and seeing if I can find a book with one of the ISBNs i’ve gotten from Yes24.

So… if our natively title is a little whack OR Yes24 doesn’t have the ISBN on the ridibooks entry OR it comes after the 3rd result on the search… then we’ll miss it. Did already find Korean Grammar in Use Beginning | L0 though! :laughing:

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