How to Read Japanese Books on PC
Japanese books can be read on a variety of different platforms such as your phone, iPad, Kindle, etc. If you’re hardcore enough, even paperback. These can all be great reading experiences but if you’re looking for maximum learning efficiency, PC is where it’s at. The Yomichan browser extension I’ve spoken about before makes reading Japanese faster, easier and more productive.
Where to Get Japanese Books From
Japanese e-books can be bought from amazon.jp with a Japanese Amazon account and read on read.amazon.in which is a web reader. After buying multiple books, your account may get locked at which point you’ll have to access amazon.jp using a VPN to be able to buy new books.
For a large collection of public domain works, there’s Aozorabunko. Unfortunately, all the notable and high-quality works are old classics that became free to publish 70 years after the author’s death. Just like English classics, these are hard to read and contain many esoteric vocabulary and kanji. Due to their age, they don’t represent modern Japanese which underwent many reforms after WW2. There are a few works suited to beginners but these are usually volunteer translations or written by amateur authors.
Finally, the illegal route. Aozorabunko is not just the name of a site but is also a .txt file format that the site publishes books in. You can find pirated books in the same format. Here is a collection of over 5000 books.
Looking for a particular book or author? Try searching for it on nyaa.si which is a torrent site for Japanese content. Just remember to add 青空文庫 to the book or author’s name.
For more tips on obtaining books check out this video by Matt vs. Japan.
Reading Books from Amazon
If you’ve decided to read on read.amazon.in, there’s not much more I can tell you about it since I haven’t used it myself to read Japanese books. Though Yomichan is much better, you also have the option of using the inbuilt dictionary of the web reader. Your progress will be saved between reading sessions.
A Note About Aozorabunko Book Files
After downloading Aozorabunko files, whether legally or illegally, you might find the names of the files in your download garbled. Upon opening the file in notepad you might find the contents similarly messed up as well.
This is due to an encoding problem in Windows (the characters needed to represent what’s written aren’t present on your machine). However, if you open the same file in Chrome, you’ll find it perfectly readable.
You can view the file in Chrome by dragging and dropping it into a new browser tab.
Using Yomichan
Yomichan is the reason why I’m recommending you to read in your browser in the first place. It lets you look up vocabulary instantly and save them to Anki. However, by default, it doesn't have permission to access local files and thus, won’t work with the books you open in Chrome.
To fix this, right-click the Yomichan extension icon next to the address bar and select Manage extensions, the last option. Scroll down on the newly opened page to the Allow access to file URLs option and toggle it on.
How to Read Aozorabunko Books in Your Browser
As you’ve seen, the simple text file by itself is perfectly readable in the browser. However, the reading experience can be improved multifold by using a simple application that brings many quality of life improvements.
JNovel Formatter is a small application that converts the Aozorabunko .txt file into HTML files. In other words, it creates a small local website for the book. Let’s see the advantages this brings us.
Furigana Formatting
In Aozorabunko text files, the reading of a word is included in the form of “kanji 《reading》”. For example, 団扇《うちわ》.
This isn’t a major problem since only a small minority of words have their reading included alongside anyway.
Nevertheless, JNF improves this by transforming it into actual furigana that sits on top/beside the word. (This is called ruby formatting).
Vertical Writing 縦書き
By default web browsers display Japanese text in horizontal, left-to-right format (横書き). However, books in Japan are written vertically, with pages going from right to left (縦書き). JNF enables turning our horizontal text file into vertical web pages.
Bookmarklets
With a normal text file, it’s hard to keep track of till where you’ve read it. You might need to save the last line you read separately, and then use find in page to reach that point again next time.
JNF gives you the choice of turning each “。” in the text into a bookmarklet. Whenever you want to save your progress in the book, you can click on the “。” of the last sentence you read and save a bookmark using Ctrl + D (on Chrome). Next time, open the book using this bookmark to reach the exact point you read till previously.
Lower Chance of Crashing or Hanging
Book .txt files, though small in size, are fairly big once opened. It can feel sluggish to adjust things like the window or font size. Just try resizing a Notepad or Chrome window of an open book file and notice how it takes a few seconds.
JNF splits the book’s .txt file into several parts; each of a set size. By default, this is 15,000 characters. There’s less likelihood of annoying freeze-ups this way because only the part you’re reading will be loaded at a time.
You can navigate between sections through links to the previous and next sections present at the top and bottom of the page. There’s also an index page listing every section.
Prettier
As you must’ve noticed, books formatted with JNF look much better. You can format the book to follow a dark theme. The font also looks prettier and more fitting for a book.
The background colour, text colour, margins, font face and font size can all be adjusted as per your liking. I’ll show you the settings I use.
How To Use JNF
The program is pretty user-friendly and self-evident. Hence, I’ll only be telling you about the settings I change and some other minor adjustments I make.
After downloading it and extracting it, run the .exe file. Click the File… button (next to Dir…) and select your .txt book to get started.
I change the orientation to Vertical. I make the text and ruby colour white. For the BG colour, I define a custom dark grey colour which is 21, 21, 21 in the red, green and blue fields.
For the font size, I like to use 18, but this can also be later adjusted while reading by zooming the page in and out. (Note: Changing the zoom level of the page also affects the size of Yomichan’s look-up box)
Most importantly, the CSS option needs to be changed to the second option of Place CSS file in each novel’s output directory.
Then click Format and once it’s finished, open the output folder and check out the newly created HTML pages. Upon opening, you’ll find that the lines are spaced way too close for comfort.
Adjusting Line Height
To adjust the amount of space between the lines, open the “jnf_style.css” file in the output folder in Notepad and paste the following line at the top:
body {line-height: 200%;}
You can replace 200% with whatever you find suitable such as 150% or 250%.
Conclusion
From what I’ve tried out so far, this is the best way to read Aozorabunko books on PC. PC is objectively the best platform to read on due to the quick access to Yomichan which can be used to look up and save words instantly.
That said, I myself prefer to read on my Kindle because it’s more comfortable to use. I can read it lying down and it’s easier to manoeuvre into a comfy reading position. Nevertheless, reading on Kindle has its own fair share of pros and cons which I’ll elucidate in an upcoming post comparing the experience of reading Japanese on different platforms.
