Resource Review: honto.jp for buying eBooks

     I’m about 1/3rd of the way through Satori Reader and I’ve been starting to have a strong itch to try some real native books out so I decided to finally take the plunge. I looked at Kindle first since I’ve bought stuff from Amazon Japan before, but it turns out you have to make a separate Amazon Japan account under a VPN to be able to buy kindle stuff, and while I *could* do that, I *hate* logging out of one account and logging into another, which is something I’d probably have to do frequently since I have a pretty large American Kindle account.

Then I looked at Kobo for about 3 seconds and saw “VPN” and “Buy a bunch of gift cards” in the same sentence and thought “Nah, that’s too much effort”.

      That led me to Honto, and out of the various eBook stores mentioned in this post it definitely puts the least amount of bullshit between “want book” and “have book”. Right off the bat, **registration** is easy and doesn’t require any VPN hijinks or weird gift card stuff. You don’t even have to put in a home address. You do have to enter your name in Japanese, so it was kinda fun turning my name into Katakana to register, almost like making a new Japanese me, but that’s literally the hardest part of signup. Infact, I get the impression the site is expecting some foreigner business judging by the Buyee link they have for physical goods, but we’re here to talk about eBooks, so let’s get straight to it.

**Content**: I’ve basically been scouring this subreddit for people’s “first book” recommendations and so far I’ve found everything I’ve looked for. If you’re *super* deep into this stuff and have really specific wants, there might be something they don’t have that perhaps Amazon does, but I’ve been able to find all the LN’s of certain anime I like such as *Dirty Pair* and *Sakurako’s Investigation* and it’s all been there. No complaints so far.

     **They also sell manga** and the image quality seemed to be good. There are a lot of first-chapter freebies on their store like *Chainsaw Man* if you want to take a stab at something familiar.

      As far as the **book format**, they seem to be **.epubx**. I haven’t tried cracking the DRM on these yet and I’m not sure if that specific brand of .epub can be de-drm’d with something like Calibre, so that may be something to research before jumping in headfirst.

**Pricing**: Shit’s *cheap* yo. Part of it probably has to do with the Yen being kind of weak right now, it used to be 100 yen was around 1 US Dollar, but now 100 yen is about 68 cents, so now’s the time to buy *basically anything* in yen prices where you can get it. Even if it was a more even tradeoff, it’d still be pretty cheap, but I’m definitely stocking up now so I can get a jump start on that *tsundoku*. I didn’t have any credit card issues. Part of why I was also dodgy about using a VPN with some other services is your card provider can get pissy about using a credit card through VPN, so another win for Honto. They also seem to throw a pretty fair number of coupons at you too, along with reward points you can apply toward purchases, so that’s pretty nice.

**Reading Experience and applications**: This is where it gets a bit jank but not bad overall.

* So far I’ve only used the PC desktop app, which greatly resembles the Amazon Kindle PC app, but with a more *2007*-ey looking interface. The small UI is probably my biggest complaint about the bookshelf since I have a 1440p monitor and it doesn’t seem to really scale (font size is available though so reading is no problem).
* One thing the PC app actually does really well is it groups books that are in a series together. Kindle PC doesn’t even do this, and if you have multiple books in one series that aren’t alphabetical, Kindle just scatters them to the wind. But on Honto it puts all the books in a folder which makes your main shelf look cleaner, and it even shows you the unpurchased books in the series making it easy to find the next one.
* Reading is mostly similar to Kindle, you have the usual color highlight functions, but highlighting text is a bit clunkier. You have to click off of your highlight to highlight *something else* if you’ve already selected some text. The most notable bit of jank is **there is no built-in dictionary** which may be a dealbreaker for some. I’m finding it’s not too bad of an issue though, because when you highlight a piece of text you do have the option to do a web search, and since I have yomichan installed it’s easy to grab the word from google and pop it into anki. A nice bonus is that searching a japanese word usually brings up a japanese definition, so there’s some J-J practice for you.
* Otherwise reading is fairly good, you’ve got your font size options, dark mode, even a mode to display thing horizontally, which looked a little janky so I’m just sticking with vertical now. My only true gripe is the lack of a single-page view on the PC version, I imagine that’s not an issue if you’re on a tablet though.
* There are mobile apps as well, and this is the one aspect that’s *kind of* region locked. You can’t download it straight from Google Play and even with a VPN on my phone I still got the wrong region error, but you can side-load the .apk just fine. [I used this website](https://apps.evozi.com/apk-downloader/?id=jp.co.dnp.eps.ebook_app.android) to paste the google play link in and that gave me an .apk to download which ran flawlessly. I didn’t really mess with the mobile version because I hate reading on a phone, but I have an android-based E-ink tablet coming that I want to put the app on, so hopefully that’s good.

**Overall**: Honto isn’t perfect, I don’t even know if I could call it a truly *great* platform, but it is the platform that was the easiest for me to get started with and that’s honestly enough for me. If you want a really refined experience or complete control over your library through well-documented and easily-cracked ecosystems, then perhaps the hoops of getting Kindle or Kobo to work are worth it, but I just wanted to get reading ASAP with as little bullshit as possible and Honto allowed me to do that. I like the service so far and plan to stay on it for my Japanese eBook buying, but there are caveats worth knowing about if you’re thinking of doing the same. It’s also the only of the three mentioned here that seems to be completely Japanese run (Kobo *is* owned by Rakuten but Kobo itself is Canadian) so that’s something I guess. Overall, I’d say Honto is **good**, but could work on a few things.