I was using Rakuten when I had those issues. Wouldn’t shock me if they were testing the waters with region locking, or if there was some asinine reason for the specific books I bought to be region locked (Bookwalker does this with adult content but I promise I wasn’t buying smut )
But then I noticed my VPN was set to Houston, TX which was a location I remember previously getting blocked on non-Japanese sites for. So I switched it to Chicago and suddenly I was let through.
I think someone has been up to no good on the Texas IP and it’s on a bad list somewhere.
【小説31巻】本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第五部「女神の化身Ⅹ」 (TOブックスラノベ) will be auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle Cloud Reader. You can go to your device to start reading.
At the speed I’m going with this series I think they will have time to crack/decrypt or find an alternative store
I get things mostly on Bookwalker, but also Amazon JP / Audible JP. Until recently, I’ve preferred Bookwalker bc Amazon got weird on me when I signed up for Kindle Unlimited. Using a VPN seems to solve that. Edit: for manga I use whatever’s cheaper.
Bookwalker often has crazy deals, but Kindle Unlimited has good ones too, and the app is a much nicer reading experience than Bookwalker app (Bookwalker desktop is even worse). So for LNs, I’m planning to stick with Amazon, in the future. Edit: while Kindle app’s UI/UX is nicer, I find Bookwalker’s (Android) integration of Google Translate a lot more useful than Amazon’s dictionary lookup, which doesn’t deal well with non-dictionary form. I still sometimes paste into a separate dictionary app, just to verify. Otoh one thing that’s nice about Kindle app is the easy integration of JP->JP dictionary. I hear on iOS that Bookwalker has actual dictionary integration.
I only read on my phone, so DRM stuff hasn’t been relevant for me.
I use old versions of Kindle for PC and Android with deDRM in Calibre and can confirm that 2023 releases don’t work. Probably because these new books come as multiple .kfx files rather than a single .azw3? I have no experience with the workaround using an actual Kindle e-ink device, though!
Also I’m not sure if this would make things less of a hassle for you, but on Amazon JP when you use a gift card as your only payment method you don’t need to do it through a VPN and all that. So once in a while I buy myself a digital gift card for as much money as I can spare at the time (which does require a VPN but my US-based bank debit card and billing address work) and then whenever I buy a book I just use the gift card balance.
Ooooh. Unfortunately I don’t know if I can take advantage; my setup is some janky Linux “everything installed is as early a version as possible”. Thanks for the heads up though!