Physical Books or E-Reader?

Oh that’s interesting approach. But with what I’m currently reading at least, I’d definitely not be able to skip certain words and be lost what’s going on.

Maybe just my vocabulary game is not good enough yet and I hit unknown words more frequently and that will go away with time and be able to do the same… maybe then I can pick up one of the physical books and take your approach and not feel overwhelmed by searching while reading.

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Reading physical books is way more exiting for me. Reminds me of my childhood spending all day reading fantasy books.

Having said that I only read physical books where I know I have 97%+ word coverage, so I don’t come across many unknown words. Usually I can guess the unknown words through context.

I do my SRS(jpdb.io) everyday and add words for the current volume/next volume im reading (until I hit 97% coverage) so I don’t feel like I’m missing out not looking up those words.

Im not sure I’ll go back to ebooks now I have a taste of physical books. I’ll probably continue getting books I want to read up to 97%+ coverage and buying the physical copies.

I can see myself using my ereader for long trips where I can’t carry the amount of books I want.

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I prefer my Kindle, but tend to use iPad more because 10ten is faster for look ups. Once I’ve graduated looking up most words, I’d like to go back to my kindle.

Reading physical books can be troublesome since I’m still relying on furigana in a lot of cases and having to hold the book closer to my face to read is annoying. Not sure if I want to start using a magnifying glass just yet haha. With kindle and ipad it’s much easier to see the text no matter the lighting or distance.

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I’m considering switching over my surface for this same reason. Maybe use one of those fancy plugins to automatically create an entry in an Anki deck.

The problem with the surface is that it’s heavy.

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Maybe I’m not allowed to say this, but I buy digital copies on bookwalker, screenshot the whole thing with an auto screen capture program, and then make them into PDFs for myself. That way I can access them anywhere from my google drive and make notes in them using the adobe acrobat DC “comment” feature.

I find that that works amazing for helping me read intensively. It’s like using a highlighter on important parts of a textbook. Whenever I reread the passage I can always hover over the comment to see what notes I had about the sentence. Here’s an example of a page.

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I’m wondering what do you think of the new kindle scribe?

I was thinking this could be good for doing workbooks for exercises in Japanese and such in ebook format (I have a few of those, but to fill them you have to print them or copy a lot of additional information to a notebook)

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I’m quite surprised that e-books seem more popular than physical books! I guess availability and ease of looking up words are two key issues. As a book lover, reading on a device always feels second best to me. There’s only one shop in my country (so far as I know) that sells any Japanese novels, so I end up prowling for second hand books online or ordering off amazon jp. Perhaps that helps make the books more precious to me - I feel like I really want to work through the pile I’ve got since it was quite an effort to acquire them!

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There was a period in my life when I moved around a lot - that’s when I switched to ebooks: carting hundreds of books around with me or always finding someone to give them to after reading was not an option. While I switched out of necessity though, I never looked back.

Benefits of ebooks for me:

  • Shop for books anywhere, any time, start reading instantly (no shipping from abroad taking ages)
  • They take up no space at all. I can have my whole library with me in my pocket.
  • Font size adjustments and zoom fuction: Failing eyes or dim light are no longer a problem. I can adjust as I see fit. Especially with kanji, I often need a magnifying glass when I read paper. I hate that.
  • Instant look ups. Not only for Japanese either. I like looking up words I know only vaguely, to better pinpoint the nuance. (I love dictionaries in general.)
  • No cover visible when you read outdoors. That may be just me, but I don’t like strangers in the train for example knowing what I read. And that’s without reading anything that might be “judged”. I just don’t want to invite conversations while I’m reading.
  • A detail but still: No trouble keeping the page open or having to crack the spine to not have the book close on you all the time.
  • Search function!

Benefits of paper books for me:

  • (I couldn’t care less about smell or weight in my hand, so I’ll skip that.) I do appreciate instantly knowing how far I am in the book though, just by looking at the thickness of the read and unread parts. Percentages are just not the same.
  • Quickly browsing through the book for that one passage I remember is easier. Not searching though.
  • Spending hours browsing bookstores is one of my favorite pastimes ever. I still do it every chance I get, although I usually buy no books (I do buy stationary) because I prefer digital. I’m aware that not buying books may cause more bookstores to close, and that’s deeply regrettable. There’s already too few where I am, and not even one selling Japanese books.
  • There are still books that aren’t available in digital form.
  • Picture books, exercise books, reference books, etc are still much better in paper form.
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I prefer physical books overall, but I’ve recently started reading on ipad and am considering getting a kobo. For Japanese, or other foreign language books, the convenience really can’t be topped. Spending like $40 on shipping really adds up. From now I’m really only buying physical Japanese books when they are ‘worth’ paying for. For example I really like the series, I plan to re-read it, etc. For a manga that will take 2 hours to read and that I probably won’t re-read, I can’t really justify the price of the physical copy. One thing I don’t like about ebooks is you technically own nothing. The service can offline, your access revoked, the book removed, etc. Physical books can last over several lifetimes.

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That’s why I buy on Amazon and remove the DRM. So I actually do own my ebooks. :slight_smile:

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Same but Rakuten. If you’re thinking of going to Kobo route @coldorange5 I’d recommend that.

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That is a good route. I still feel digital media is much more precarious than physical though. While paper can get wet, burned, and so on, digital media ages at a rapid and unexpected
pace. If a book 200 year old book in good condition is completely readable, while files from 20 years ago might not be without going through a lot of hoops. I’ve had times where files randomly get corrupted for example. Plus there are many file types, versions and so on from the past that are unreadable by modern computers. It really isn’t a big problem for the average person, so this is a bit of a rant, but I used to work in an archive so I think about this kind of thing a lot lol. :sweat_smile:

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Does anyone have any recommendation for reading apps? With good built in dictionaries? I don’t like the kindle dictionary. I’ve tried Japanese - English and Japanese -Japanese dictionaries in it…

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I mostly use my ipad now which uses the ios dictionaries (not bad, honestly) and a mix of the native Books app and another app called Yomu. Back when I read on Android I used Moon Reader and I sideloaded dictionaries that I wanted to use via ColorDict. I know some people also read epubs in their browser to take advantage of Yomichan / similar browser extensions, but I personally hate reading long form media on my computer.

All of these require breaking the DRM however. I can’t vouch for any native apps, but can say that Honto, ebookJapan, BookLive, and Bookwalker (Android) all have no or useless dictionaries.

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I get my books from Bookwalker, and I have found no way to strip the DRM from them. Reading on the iPad is great, both built-in iOs dictionaries (J-E and J-J) are quite good, and for the times they fail I have Midori at the ready on a slide over window. It makes the process quite seamless. Even when I read Aozora texts on other apps, dictionary use is much the same.

Android is a pain. The only integrated “dictionary” seems to be Google Translate, which is awful and not a dictionary at all. Many other dictionaries were supposed to pop up on text copying, but then Android did something with clipboard “safety” which means there have to be multiple taps until you finally reach a dictionary, by which point you’re taken out of the book. I tried using Aedict reader, which does open a floating window over the book instead of a whole different app, but there are too many steps involved for my liking, and the floating window is often too small to contain all relevant information. So now I just tap for Google Translate, use the button to copy the text, then open Takoboto and paste there for a definition. As I said, a pain, but I’ve sort of gotten used to it.

I would have thought the Kindle would be very comfortable to read on. I’ve tried the dictionaries with other languages and they worked great. Too bad that apparently that’s not the case with Japanese… Is it the dictionaries themselves, or the fact that words are not recognized correctly?

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Would agree that the default J-J and J-E dictionaries in kindle aren’t great but luckily it’s easy to add more dictionaries (I possibly have too many :sweat_smile:)

I’ m pretty sure I followed the advice in this Matt vs Japan video which also includes a download link to a bunch more dictionaries: How to Use a Kindle to Learn Japanese - YouTube

After having done that, the kindle is pretty hard to beat for reading in Japanese (if I could directly mine cards from it then it really would be perfect)

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So I’ve been looking into devices, and I still can’t decide between.

Kindle Scribe - Unknown territory, looks good on paper
iPad mini - Kinda small?
iPad Air - Maybe too heavy for long reading sessions?
Normal iPad - Way too big.

I’m curious people who use iPads, which models do you have and how do you read? Do you have a stand? Do you hold it the whole time?

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I have a 9.7 inch iPad Pro. I usually rest it against my legs or whatever else is available, so the weight never bothered me. It’s okay to hold without support for some time, anyway, although certainly not for too long. I also have a stand, but I always forget where it is, so I almost never use it.
An iPad mini might be too small for manga, but I wouldn’t mind it for books. After all, I do read on my phone occasionally, and that is significantly smaller than a mini.

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Looking up words in Japanese on Kindle is mostly fine. I agree that the default dictionary isn’t great, which is why I added a JMDict dictionary (basically what all J-E dictionary websites/apps use).

Additionally, Kindle is mostly capable of deconjugating text to look up the words, unlike Kindle apps on things like iPad that can’t do that. That said, Kindle often fails to deconjugate compound words (think 気になった to get 気になる), especially when they get long. And it also sometimes refuses to look up short words, even getting “stubborn” so to speak, not allowing you to even drag the highlighted range to highlight what you want. That specifically is probably my biggest frustration with the Kindle dictionary feature, even though overall I still think it’s good.

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The same drawbacks are more or less present in the iOS built-in dictionaries too. Compound verbs with 切る or 込む for example are rarely recognized, and not even the first part comes up sometimes. Set expressions are almost never treated as such -which is why it’s so good to have easy access to side dictionaries too. Oh, and kanji with furigana, or words written in katakana for emphasis, usually bring up no results. Those are easy to type in any other dictionary though, so that doesn’t bother me too much.

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