Dragon Ball Japanese ebooks: accessible and handy?

[Cold Skin]

In case some of you guys are used to getting Japanese ebooks about DB (or anything else, I guess), my two questions are:

- Can a foreigner easily buy the Japanese DB ebooks? (is there anything like region-lock? Any trustworthy site you use?)
- Is your ebook handy to use then? (it's probably forcing the use of a specific reading app, so I would like to be at least able to zoom)

See, I might be interested in getting the digital Dragon Ball Super full color edition - which is exclusive to Japan right now and perhaps for a certain number of years to come. But I don't know if there's a handy and trustworthy way to buy digital Japanese versions.

And my second question comes from the fact that some e-readers like Adobe don't allow you to zoom at all, meaning you have no hope of being able to read a manga on a laptop like I do or even see the pictures properly. If you have any page of anything saved on your PC, open it and imagine there is zero zoom option, just the global view of the page. This is ridiculous. After buying one of the French DB ebooks and seeing what Adobe was like, I thought I would never do it again since the thing was just not readable due to zoom being deactivated for "epub" files. And this hasn't changed despite people complaining about the inability to zoom for years from what I've seen (it's supposed to make the text itself go bigger, but it just doesn't work on any manga or comics since the text is part of the picture and would create a big mess all over the drawings if you made it bigger anyway).

Luckily, the popular French shop I used does encourage you to use a specific, much better alternative to Adobe (which is just the default option). They give a direct access to the alternative app and the app directly links to the shop's account to check what you bought and it DOES allow you to zoom in and out as much as you want! So it ended well for my French e-mangas and I've bought a few since then.

But now, I'm thinking "what if I manage to buy the DBS color edition on a Japanese site and ultimately, I pay just to have a far view of the whole page again, without being able to even zoom in and see the colored pictures I paid for?".

So, can you guys tell me anything about any experience you had buying Japanese e-mangas?

[marumuju]

I use Bookwalker almost daily. They have a Japanese store and a Global store, but the catch is that the same account works on both stores. They even have instructions how to buy from the JP store. There are both mobile and desktop apps for PC, Mac, iOS and Android.

Good points:

• They have more free manga than anybody can reasonably read as limited time offers (usually 1-3 first tankoubons from a discounted series).

• Japanese books have Japanese prices (cheap!).

• Lots of weekly/monthly manga magazines are available too.

• Zooming is possible.

• You can pay with your normal credit card (non-Japanese) or Paypal.

Bad points:

• You can only read the books through the apps. You can download the books anytime or anywhere you want but no files to call your own.

• The quality of the images is passable, but not great in some cases. Some books have been razor sharp though, I guess it depends on the publisher.

EDIT: I didn’t find the Super Color edition by a cursory glance yet, but it may be there somewhere. Here is the first volume.

[Cold Skin]

^ Thanks a lot, that might be the kind of thing that I was looking for: easily accessible for foreign buyers and with zoom to actually see what you bought.

Judging by the quality of the preview pages of the DBS color edition, it seems perfectly fine to me when I zoom in, they seem to have this collection in a good quality!

I'll see if they have the rest of the volumes as well, but it seems very promising right now!
Thanks again for that very complete answer AND the link, you are very helpful!
Didn't expect to have such a useful post so fast!

[marumuju]

Glad to have been of help! The service is not perfect, but it works

I do not have experience with any other services so it was not the most well-rounded answer. I think at least eBookJapan has been locked behind a yahoo.co.jp account (for which you need a Japanese phone number).

[thejeremymenace]

Rakuten Kobo is great for ebooks, and the DRM is easily removable, however sometime in the past few months they seem to have stopped taking foreign credit cards (none of mine work at least, but YMMV). If you know anyone in Japan, they can buy you a points card at a convenience store to add funds to your account.

https://books.rakuten.co.jp/search?g=10 ... D%E7%B7%A8

[Cold Skin]

^ It's actually the app I was talking about that saved by French ebooks, the one recommended by the French store with a direct link to it.
When I linked the app to the French store account, it automatically synchronized with it to check what was in my list of "bought ebooks" and it automatically downloaded them for immediate access. No additionnal account to create or anything, very handy!

When I saw your post, I tried searching on Rakuten Kobo for the Dragon Ball Super color edition, since I hadn't even tried the in-app search engine yet. It would have been an easy way to get what I want, cause I already have the app working for me and all. But unfortunately, it only displayed the regular volumes in various languages (English, Spanish, Japanese...) and the color edition never appeared in the 20-pages search results. Whether I tried to specify "color" or "digital" or even simply typed "Dragon Ball Super" without additionnal mentions, it was the same list of results.

So it didn't work out in the end with the app, but maybe the website itself, using your link, can get me some stuff that the app itself can't get me, so I'll try to check things around! Thanks!

I still have Bookwalker to try in my free time too, as adviced by Marumuju.
I'll check it all out whenever I have free time, there's no rush.

EDIT: The search seems to work with the website itself, with links to all volumes. I'll see if I can use it properly later (https://books.rakuten.co.jp/rk/603b8c27 ... em-text-39), if there's a way to switch between shops when it comes to the app, or have the app synchronize with several shops at the same time. It's all still a bit blurry for me, but I'll check and try stuff.

[Cold Skin]

Thank you guys, I managed to get what I wanted!

Followed the Bookwalker method and it worked (since the other one would have likely denied my foreign credit card anyway)!
This is great, thanks again for the advice, both of you!