How does one get support reading Japanese with stuff from Bookwalker?
With Amazon, I get my light novels onto ttu-reader and then I can use yomitan plugin.
I just opened the same light novel (trial copy) on my firefox browser in the bookwalker reader, and I’m like ‘now what?’
Doesn’t seem to be any kind of dictionary function… Is the app any different? I can’t see a way that I’ll be able to consume bookwalker content at the moment.
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I feel like I ask this question a lot! Sorry!
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Honestly, I just have the DeepL desktop app app on my computer and pull that up to manually look up words. Kanjitomo ocr is also a big help when there isn’t furigana. I don’t know of a way to make them into epub files, which is why I only buy manga on bookwalker.
With novels I just save myself the trouble and only purchase them through amazon kindle, and then use ePuber Ultimate to turn them into epub files so I can use them with the ttu reader. There’s just too many words I need to look up with those.
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The app on ios uses the ios Japanese dictionary, the app on Android does not have nor let you use a dictionary (it has a “translate” but that’s just not the same…).
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I just use the translate to c/p into a dictionary app on Android. Or use Google lens from my phone. Thankfully Bookwalker doesn’t limit copying, unlike Kindle app.
At this point tho, I’m preferring Kindle app, bc I’m finally getting comfy with monolingual dictionaries… tho it still sucks at conjugations, and sometimes the dictionary result is just weird. But I can just turn to my phone in that case
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I’ve done the copy to dictionary thing but it drove me mad and is actually the reason I bought an iPad at all (decent native dictionary).
aside in ipads
Also iBooks is like the only app that seems able to properly load a variety and of Japanese epubs and not choke on either the text format or any included images.
For android of course Google books does ok with Japanese epubs, but not as throughly good as iBooks.
I also have beef with the fact that Bookwalker limits how much you can highlight as in stories with lots of characters I will highlight names and note their reading as well as relevant character notes (age, relationships, job title, etc).
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I have never understood this. It’s so random. Even more pointless than all the JP websites that disabled text selection and right clicking
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Book previews do not allow you to select text, and by extension doesn’t allow dictionary lookups.
On computer, for a book you do own, a long click starts the selection, then just drag over the part you want to select. Letting go brings the contextual menu, which includes a dictionary function.
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It’s an anti-scraping measure, I think, since your browser doesn’t have the text content and it has to make an API call to get it (and presumably will get blocked if it makes too many).
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I use an OCR add-on for firefox (copyfish) which basically takes a screenshot, then use yomitan on that.
For similar sources, I use https://capture2text.sourceforge.net/, then if I’m not satisfied with the translation, I copy it to whatever dictionary.
The text is already loaded and fully visible on the page, so unless it’s displaying an image (which some lyrics sites actually do 
) your browser would already have the text. The ability to disable right click via JavaScript is far older than websites using APIs like that (at least as early as 2008, if not earlier).
Web scrapers don’t need to right click in the first place, and even for sites that lazy load the text, you just write the scraper with selenium, which is perfectly capable of clicking, or doing basically anything you can do as a user
Booklive (and Bookwalker I assume) also does that (display as an image, I mean) to prevent you from being able to easily extract the text!
Selection by long click actually tells the server where you are clicking and then it does the selection on its side.
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So what Bookwalker is actually sending is a scrambled image, and a JSON blob telling it which slices of the scrambled image to render where, then writing that out to a HTML canvas. It also has an index for where each of those locations were in the source file.
If you do a selection, it then sends those indices back to the server to get the text content.
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That’s impressive. Of course it doesn’t prevent screenshots and OCR 
Just to clarify, I was talking about regular websites, not Bookwalker. Anyway, thx for sharing
Ehhh some portion of that has to be client side, unless you’re telling me you can’t select text when it’s offline? (Certainly in the app you can). That would be some next level stupidity tho (less for the UX and more for the amount of bandwidth/server resources that would probably waste)
Edit: and from araigoshi’s description, I don’t see why the server would be involved, until you’re asking it for translation, copy, highlight, etc
I’m talking about the browser reader, but yes, that’s correct. If you display a book page, turn off internet and then try to select, you get an error. See @araigoshi’s technical explanation for how it works.
The app works differently. Instead, the content is encrypted and only decrypted on the fly when showing a page.
Edit: ah, when you talked about websites preventing text selection and right click, I thought you meant Bookwalker and the like, due to the thread we are in…
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That’s impressively wasteful then lmao.
No worries re: the context switch, I should have been clearer about that
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Actually, that might have changed, because I just tried again on Booklive, and it worked (selecting after turning off my internet connection). If so, everything should be indeed available on the client side… That changes a lot of things for me.
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For iOS you can use the Nihongo Pro app, just take an image of the manga page then click on any words you want to look up.
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You don’t even need an app for that, just stock iOS you can select the text and look it up from a photo.
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