Any advice on reliable parcel forwarding stuff (I suspect ‘cheap’ is not a factor here, but that would be great if possible…?) Looking to buy some used manga from Aus, probably just off amazon, and trying to figure out what amount of cheap-as-chips manga I need to buy before it actually becomes worth it…
Main ones I see floating are Tenso and WhiteRabbit.
I have been very happy with FromJapan. 
+1
Also for those who order physical media. I just went back to CDJapan after receiving an email that they lowered the shipping prices, and holy moly, they are now cheaper than AmazonJP and they do Customs/VAT for you!
Thanks for the heads up on shipping cost changes – I’ll redo a comparison with Amazon next time I put in an order. (What I’d really like them to fix is the way they have a lot fewer books available than other sellers.)
They’ve done customs/VAT on their end for at least a year now. I get the impression there was some kind of change in EU and UK regulations that puts this requirement on the seller now, so everybody either does it or has got out of the international shipping business.
Yes, I guess that’s true, but they started to do it recently by my carrier of choice (DHL).
I just ordered a big ass game box, with clothing and a bunch of other goodies and the shipping was less than 20EUR.
I saved about 25-30EUR vs ordering at AmazonJP.
My public postal service is terrible handling VAT/Customs, even when it comes prepaid.
Sometimes they even ask to pay again and claim later.
Might I interest you in a brief write up on it in the Book Providers Megathread (Official Management) …? 
I just placed an order a couple days ago (I think after this shipping drop, but not sure since I didn’t get this email) and it cost 9,090 yen cost+shipping for 8 manga. Adding those same mange on Amazon gives a cost of 10,788 yen. The manga itself is slightly more expensive for some reason (300 yen), but the shipping is a whopping 1,400 yen higher on Amazon. This is to the US of course. I’ll be curious to see how it works out for you as well.
For those curious, general +1 from me for CDJapan based on the packaging alone. Worst I’ve had from CDJapan was a slightly bent corner. When I used to order from Amazon I’ve had completely torn obi and severely bent corners, which isn’t surprising since they barely secured the manga in the package (and a couple times they just threw them in loosely with no padding at all). Even when CDJapan is slightly more expensive than Amazon I’d still pick them.
Wow I haven’t thought of CDJapan since I was literally buying CDs from Japan in college (I’m old 
). I’ll definitely check them out next time I need to do a physical order. I give a lot of money to Jeff Bezo’s Rocket Fund, but I prefer not to when I have the choice.
I feel like we’ve had this conversation before, but for me (UK shipping) Amazon shows with-Japanese-sales-tax prices right the way up to checkout, and then corrects them to without-tax; I’ve never seen a book priced differently between cdjapan and amazon and kinokuniya once you take that into account, it’s always a shipping difference, plus any points scheme they have. I wonder if Amazon is applying a local US state sales tax for you where cdjapan doesn’t, maybe?
I also have had the “Amazon packs books really badly” experience. I’ve also had “of the ten books I was looking to buy, cdjapan didn’t have three of them” experiences.
Kinokuniya is hard to recommend just because of their shipping cost structure having a huge cliff at 2kg.
I miss honto.jp doing international shipping, they used to be my favourite til they stopped doing it except through a proxy service.
For real?? 
I always liked CDJapan even before, since they have a huge selection and pack items well, so if shipping is less egregious I really have no reason to look anywhere else for new books.
This. 
That seems likely. Yet another reason for me to stick with CDJapan.
You can request books to be added, if you are missing something. Worth a shot if it’s overall a more pleasant shopping experience.
Hmm. At “30% of what I want is just not there” I feel like they have a more systematic problem than is fixable by individual requests…
Do you read a lot of obscure books? I only order physical manga, but I’ve never had a manga be completely missing from the site. I’ve had issues with items being out of stock or out of print, but then they’re usually not available on Amazon either.
The last couple of examples I remember are books from WK’s Kindaichi reading club, which I wouldn’t classify as obscure. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they were better at manga than books.
That’s wild. I checked what ordering 5 books for 3500 yen would cost to ship and it was 3000 yen 
Oh well, seems like I’m more and more all digital lately.
I would be too… if digital quality didn’t suck half the time. Why are people releasing 200 page manga at < 50MB in 2023? These should be more like 150-200MB for good quality.
(Even when they do have higher quality scans in 2023, often that’s like volume 10, so you still have to deal with bad quality for many volumes before getting to the good quality scans.)
It would be interesting to read an interview with a manga publisher about what their view of digital sales is – are they still seeing it as a side thing to their “real” business of selling print manga volumes? Do they deliberately keep the quality low in the same way that the monthly manga magazines get printed on lousy paper as a loss leader to entice readers into buying the collected volumes of the series they like? Or is that too much of a conspiracy theory?
It could also be due to the cost of storing 3-4 times the amount of data. Or any combination of these factors. It really would be interesting to hear insider views on this.
