[zerokyuu]

> “The home-made e-book market will continue to exist as long as the copyright situation isn’t dealt with and people cannot find books they want in electronic format"

Sorry this is a bit unrelated, but out of curiosity, are there any legal ways to buy Japanese books in an electronic format? I have been trying to start reading books in Japanese but I don't know enough kanji to make it enjoyable.

I actually came up with my own way around this.. I bought a physical copy of the book, opened it to a random page, did a quoted search ("たとえば") on google for a full, unique sentence and found some plain text copies. I wrote a script to quickly format this in html and used rikaikun/chan to make reading easier (just put the mouse over words I don't know and it looks them up). The problem is that this limits me to reading in a browser on a computer (with chrome or firefox installed).

I've actually been interested in doing some sort of app like this (probably for free). Then adding the functionality to add words I don't know to a word bank that I can practice on my own later. If anyone is interested, please let me know. The biggest thing stopping me is that I don't see any way to get legal content for this (and the fact I do not have a lot of spare time). Does anyone know if some Japanese books/stories are in the public domain?

[jfoley]

You might look in to the 青空文庫 http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

[zerokyuu]

Wow, this looks really great. Sounds like there is currently a 50 year limit on copyright. I found a bunch of works I haven't read by Akutagawa Ryunosuke that are public domain.

Thank you so much!