Buying ebooks in Japan, part 2

So, the Rakuten thing was, in the end, a... partial success at most.

I still have very little idea of what was going on technically bar my own guesses, but then I didn't actually ask for the specifics of their technology.

As a reminder, I began with an English Kobo account linked to a Yahoo email address. I then ended up with a Japanese Rakuten-Kobo account linked to a Gmail account. My Kobo device could only be registered with one of these accounts at a time, so it wasn't possible to view both sets of books on the same device.

The customer service people explained that they thought they could find a way to unify my 'libraries' (the books I've bought from Kobo and Rakuten-Kobo respectively) into a single account. I could then read books from both Kobo and Rakuten-Kobo on the same However, that account would be assigned to one country. For complicated and annoying legal reasons, most booksellers can only sell their books (including electronic ones) within a single country. For this reason, I'd only be able to access the account while I was in that country, and any books from the wrong country would be unavailable anywhere else. This was, as you might imagine, Not Okay.

I eventually worked out that although I can't load Japanese books onto my English Kobo device, I can set the Kobo desktop software to link to my Japanese account. This allows me to read the books on my computer. It's a very poor solution on a broad scale, but it does solve the immediate problem. I have closed my correspondence with Kobo.

However, I'm basically going to have to advise anyone visiting Japan that:

1. You should not bother trying to buy ebooks from Rakuten-obo, even if you have a Kobo account.
2. You should not bother buying books from any other Japanese publisher unless you are willing for your books to be unavailable as soon as you leave the country. As far as I can establish (not, admittedly, very far), all the notable Japanese e-book retailers use heavy DRM and restrict access to your account based on your computer's current location.
3. I was unable to find any Japanese retailers who do not use DRM. Not only DRM, but app-based DRM. You will need the retailer's own proprietary software to read any ebooks. There don't currently seem to be any Japanese equivalents of Smashwords, Baen or other publishers who sell ebooks that you can just use, unless they're so small that their output is probably not useful to the casual reader.
4. Essentially, it seems that currently buying Japanese ebooks is a complete waste of time and money. They have no interest in making this convenient for you and don't trust you as far as they can throw you, even though you are the one giving them money. This attitude is sadly prevalent in all countries, but I haven't found any exceptions in Japan.
5. You will almost certainly not be able to access your account from outside the coutnry, which means not only inability to buy new books, but also to download books you already paid for. If you do ignore my advice and buy some, make very sure to download them while you're in-country.

All that being said, it is technically possible to buy books while you're in Japan. People of a certain bolshie inclination will be aware that methods exist to remove DRM and other protections from ebooks, allowing you (rather than the publisher) to control what happens with them - such as where you can read them, using what devices. It's even technically possible to use a proxy server to pretend to be in Japan, in order to buy books. However, these methods are not necessarily strictly legal in a lot of places, and (perhaps more importantly to many readers?) involve an awful lot of hassle. So these aren't exactly a good alternative solution.

At present, the advantages of e-books are not sufficiently exploited to make them worthwhile. Paper books may take up space and cost money to transport (the great advantages of e-books), but a paper book doesn't care where you want to read it. You can buy a paper book from another country and have it sent to you, but cannot buy a digital copy of the same book from that other country (despite the obvious environmental advantages) even though both seem to be functionally identical in that you're buying a book outside the country where the company is licensed to sell it. Why? I dunno.

Sadly, British retailers sell a terrifyingly small amount of non-English literature, mostly the sort of things that appear on exam syllabi and win awards for being thoroughly miserable (thus marking them out as Proper Literature). Linguists, polyglots and expats are still left with the problem that books really need to be imported, as paper items, at a premium, via specialist bookshops or expensive international shipping. Have fun.

Buying ebooks in Japan, part 1

So, some time ago I started moving away from physical books on account of having filled all the physical space with books. I began buying e-books instead. These are surprisingly good, considering my first suspicious, and I've found it a great help. Now, one of the reasons I have so many books is that I own a lot of books that are quite specialised, and so hard to get in libraries and so on (so hard, in fact, that I sort of stopped using libraries). Of the, um... 1000+ books that I do or recently did own, 200 are in non-English languages, while a large number are genre fiction or just old stuff that doesn't tend to end up in libraries (a lot of this is second-hand, or left over from my childhood, or both).

Well, after a very hesitant and reluctant start, ebooks are starting to become a thing in Japan. I suspect one reason it's slow is that a lot of books are very cheap here already - there are massive bookshops selling second-hand stuff for 75p, and so on - so they feel fairly disposable? Regardless, I thought this was a good time to try taking the plunge, because if I can conveniently get Japanese books as data, that would be really handy in the future.

First off, Rakuten. This is a big player in Japan, a kind of Amazon affair. It also now owns Kobo, the brand of ebook reader I own. In the process of buying it, they managed to make it impossible to log into the UK Kobo website from Japan, leaving me entirely unable to do anything with my account, because I'm forcibly redirected to the Rakuten site which doesn't give access to my Kobo account. Joy! But let's try buying something from them.

I track down a cheap ebook.

Despite Rakuten's ebooks being sold through Kobo, apparently they haven't actually made the systems compatible, so I can't log in with my Kobo account to buy it. I need to create a new account.

I need to register with Japanese address and phone number. This is a bit extreme, I feel. Far too much detail, not necessary, especially when you're only buying ebooks!

After some time, I have successfully registered with Rakuten, but I can't buy anything. Because, even though they let me create an account, they refuse to let me buy any of their Rakuten-Kobo ebooks because I used the same email address to register with Rakuten that I already had with Kobo and these two are apparently in conflict. This is rampant imbecility of a kind rarely parallelled.

I fire off an infuriated email, sigh and go to do the washing up.

A pleasant customer service person writes back:

According to our record, you could not buy an e-book from us because the account you created here was same as the one from your country.

In order to create Rakuten Kobo account you will need to register with other account but my email address. LINK.

I do this, and to my surprise, it works! I buy one book, for about £2, as a test, which is all I'm doing really. Then I open the Kobo desktop application, attach my Kobo to the computer, and wait for it to update. It does. The book still isn't there.

Kind customer service person (henceforth KCSP) writes back to confirm that I own the book, and explains sychronisation (the updating thing) in case I'm doing it wrong. I'm not.

I write back and ask whether the problem is not, in fact, that my Kobo is registered to my original Yahoo email address, used to set up my original Kobo account, whilst the book was bought on my Rakuten-Kobo account linked to my Gmail address. I am feeling increasingly sorry for KCSP by now, but I like to think that my teachers would be proud of me on account of how I'm doing all of this in Japanese.

KCSP replies with various points. Firstly, apparently I should really be talking to Kobo UK since that's where I bought my Kobo. However, they will keep helping me for now. I am grateful for this, because Kobo UK essentially shrugged like a French waiter when I first had problems arriving here, and that definitely didn't reply to my emails within an hour.

Secondly, they are a bit confused by my accounts. I, also.

Thirdly, they want various details.

After a good night's sleep to digest this on a clear head (seriously, you try reading customer service emails about a highly technical matter* in another language after studying for 8 hours) I reply. It's not exactly a direct reply, but I basically write out the entire history of my interactions with Kobo, laying out purchases, accounts, email addresses and what went wrong at each stage, so they can be clear. All I want is to be able to buy books in both Japanese and English, and read them on my device what I purchased from the company what sells these books. The only reason I'm using Rakuten is because I can't get to the Kobo website - although admittedly I'm not sure that sells books in Japanese. Maybe? I don't know, because I'm not allowed to look at it.

Watch this space...

* I'm really not clear on exactly what's going on, but basically they have apparently made a horrible bodge of setting up systems when Rakuten bought Kobo. The Rakuten system is aware of my Kobo account just enough to stop me registering a Rakuten account with the same email address as my Kobo account, but not enough to let me either a) log in with my Kobo account, or b) unify the contents of these accounts in any way. This is a Very Specific Level of unification.

The Busan visa run, experience and suggestions

So this is sort of aimed at other GenkiJACS Fukuoka students who want to stay longer than 3 months. It's difficult getting a visa, so the visa waiver scheme is great for those who can use it. The problem is that you need to renew it around the 3-month mark, and doing this means leaving the country for a bit. The classic scheme is to nip over to Korea for the night.

I spent ten hours since leaving my flat to arriving here. Only 35 minutes of that was spent flying between the two countries. I spent about an hour travelling within Japan, another hour on the bus from Busan airport, and seven hours waiting around. If things had gone to plan, this would have been a mere three hours - slightly more than I spent actually moving anywhere. I can expect the same on the way back. I left early in the morning and will return in mid-evening.

As far as I can make out, this means that the best case is wasting two full days mostly hanging around in airports of surpassing tedium or on transport to and from them, plus additional time making arrangements and checking paperwork, and spending in the neighbourhood of £250, in order to get one piece of paper replaced with an identical piece of paper that you are more or less automatically entitled to anyway. This is an absolutely fantastic use of everyone's time and money. I try to be understanding, but I can't help caring about things like processes and efficiency, and when I think how much better the world would be if you could simply go to an office (a local office, not out at an airport where it's convenient for nobody) and answer the questions and get your permit extended, without the one simple yet vast hoop of "must leave the country" to jump through... at least the notoriously awful-with-visas USA lets you walk across a bridge and back.

I feel slightly mean disliking Busan, but so far 100% of my experience with Busan, and indeed Korea as a whole, has been entirely negative. This is in no way Busan's fault, or anyone's really. I was obliged to come here for no good reason, which never helps, and I have no personal desire to be here. My flight was delayed three hours. The first airport bus refused to let anyone one for reasons nobody understood and left us waiting for another 40 minutes, followed by a tedius 50-minute drive in through a grotty, concrete-ridden industrial suburb of the kind that always infest airports. Because of the typhoon, it's grey and miserable and chucking it down with rain, so even if I had any desire to explore the streets of a city where I don't speak a single word of the language, I wouldn't. I'm going to get soaked as soon as I step out for some food, and have no idea where to find any, because in Korea Google Street View doesn't work in about 90% of streets, so you can't scan the local area for promising eateries.* And I just discovered that a very reasonable law here prevents hotels from offering disposable toothbrushes, but I deliberately didn't bring a toothbrush and toothpaste because the Kumamoto branch of the exact same hotel provided these, and getting toothpaste through airport security is a pain, which means I now need to locate and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush so I can throw it away tomorrow, thereby undermining the whole aim of the law anyway.

*From what I've read, this seems to be for military security. Nobody else explicitly mentions Street View not working, but rather limitations on maps. But there are very clearly massive restrictions on Street view because you simply can't go to most places at all, on multiple attempts over several days.

Advice

For anyone else making the trip, I would honestly advise going one of two ways. The first is to plan an actual holiday of a few days in Korea and go somewhere more immediately preposessing, or indeed to a different country altogether, rather than taking the shortest possible trip out of Japan over to Busan. You're going to be travelling for a long time, you might as well get something out of it that you might enjoy.

The alternative I'll suggest would be to make it as short as physically possible. Aim to get a mid-morning flight and to fly back in late afternoon. Don't bother leaving the airport. Bring a packed meal so you aren't reliant on the dismal food selection in airports, and something to do for the ten hours or so you'll likely spend hanging around. This will be a rubbish day, but at least it should only be one day. You'll also save on the time and energy of taking the bus into Busan just in order to sleep and eat there, as well as the money you'd otherwise spend on the hotel and travel.