Amazon now offers Japanese ebooks and readers

Good news for Japanese book fans and language students: Amazon is launching a Japanese language Kindle, due to be released on November 19th! Around 50,000 titles are now available in Japanese in the Kindle store, as the Japanese language Kindle app was made available on smartphones, tablets and online last month. There is a huge emphasis on graphic books, with 15,000 manga titles, and Amazon states that the Kindle offers the best experience for reading Manga. The number of titles overall is limited as publishers fear that digitising their books will hurt sales of hard copies of books. The US Kindle store has over a million titles.

Rakuten already launched the Kobo e-reader in Japan with 30,000 titles; and Sony’s e-Reader is available with 60,000 titles.