Harry Potter in Japanese

There are digital versions of Harry Potter series sold by Potter More. The non-Japanese versions are available in Kindle format, but the Japanese versions are only available in epub3 format.

If you want to read them on your kindle paperwhite, you have to:

  • download the epub3 format
  • convert ith with kindlegen as in the previous post
  • put them on your device via USB

After that you can read your Harry Potter books in Japanese on the Kindle.

9 Responses

  1. Eric says:

    You sir (or madam), are a gentleman (or lady) and a scholar! Thanks very much for this little post.

    I now have my Japanese HP book working on my Kindle Paperwhite! 😀

  2. Tom says:

    I used Calibre to convert it. It works but…
    1. it’s no longer vertical (no big deal)
    2. all of the furigana are included- often between kanji. This is really annoying and I would like to remove them.

    Does your method improve the output?

    • Hi Tom,
      yes, using kindlegen you get proper vertical layout and furigana on the side. I also tried first with calibre, but that was a desaster. Try kindlegen, that works great.

  3. Tom says:

    Great! Can’t wait to try it out.

  4. Tom says:

    It worked!
    Note: needs the newest kindlegen (2.9)

    very happy camper here 🙂

    • Good to hear! The newest kindlegen? I did it a year or so ago, and used the latest at that time, though.

      Enjoy reading in Japanese – I try to read a bit every day!

  5. Tom says:

    The new Paperwhite system has some nice features, but the Harry Potter books can’t take advantage of them– i.e. the vocabulary builder app. Also the word selection process has gotten worse, if that were possible.

    Previously, trying to select a word would select every letter up to a different alphabet (kanji, kana…)
    Now it selects the whole sentence. Then adjusting is a nightmare. The top adjuster seems to work for me, but the bottom one is a headache.

    “A Christmas Carol” from Aozora Bunko (can’t remember if I got it from Amazon or the Aozora page) works great.

    I’m wondering if there is some language setting that needs to be taken care of.

    Has anyone else had a problem?

    • Hi Tom,
      thanks for your comment. I don’t own a PW2 (the new one), so I cannot comment on that, but I have two theories:
      * the made the sentence selection default because they want to make it easy to annotate things
      * some html code in the azw3/mobi has changed.

      Have you tried reconverting the original epub with the latest kindlegen? No idea if the might be change. You might also look into the html source of the mobi to see differences in the html representation, which might explain the different behaviour.

      And concerning the selection, well, yes, that is difficult. I wrote about that in Reading Japanese: Kindle Paperwhite versus Kobo Glo, none of the selection methods was perfect, but the PW(1,old) one was quite good. Recently Kobo has improved that, though.

      Not very helpful, sorry, as long as I don’t have a PW2.

      All the best

      Norbert

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