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.
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.
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.
I’m assuming that publishers are keeping original copies themselves though. If I were them, I wouldn’t trust Amazon or Bookwalker to keep my “original” copies. I agree that it’s likely not the main factor though.
上田文人の世界 ~言葉のないゲームはどのように生まれたのか? | L30?? - This one talks about the inspiration and design process for Fumito Ueda’s works (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian). 吉田の日々赤裸々。 『ファイナルファンタジーXIV』はなぜ新生できたのか | L46?? - A series of essays written for (I believe) Famitsu by Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P of FFXIV fame) about his work revamping FFXIV.
I’m fans of both franchises already, so they just naturally popped up on my radar! For instance, I saw the initial announcement of the 上田文人 book pop up and had to wait months for it to actually be released, haha.
Oof, jelly about that Ffxiv book. Stopped playing quite a while ago but that would be an interesting read. I assume you’ve seen the document from noclip?
