Tear down this e-wall!

The walled gardens built around electronic media in Japan hail back to the heyday of the anime DVD boom. Reimportation became an issue due to the big price differences between domestically produced DVDs and what you could order from Amazon US or buy at Walmart and ship abroad.

In Japan, copyrighted works like music, movies, and books are exempt from price fixing laws that prohibit the imposition of resale price maintenance rules on resellers. That means a Japanese publisher can enforce the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) on intellectual property published and sold in Japan.

Even so, the reimportation of Japanese books has never been part of the debate. Piracy has since become a bigger problem. But, if anything, walled gardens exacerbate the piracy problem.

And yet those walled gardens persist.

When you publish a Kindle ebook on Amazon's KDP platform, you can make it available on all Amazon platforms. In a sane world, every digital title in the Amazon catalog would be listed in every Amazon store worldwide. But purchasing Japanese Kindle ebooks on Amazon outside of Japan requires jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Precisely the sort of thing the World Wide Web was supposed to eliminate by being, you know, World Wide. Some progress has finally been made on that front, with legal Japanese IP finding purchase outside the walls.

Amazon US breaks out Japanese as its own category in the Foreign Language section of the Kindle store. Given the great appeal of manga, the e-walls there are crumbling the fastest. The Japanese edition of Ascendance of a Bookworm can be purchased from Amazon US in both the ebook and paperback formats.

But wait! Upon closer inspection, that paperback actually ships from Sakura Dreams, a third party seller, not Amazon itself.

Those walled gardens still exist. Companies like Apple and Amazon are basically tossing titles over the walls rather than breaking them down and creating an all-inclusive catalog in the cloud.

This makes sense for paperbacks, as warehousing and shipping traditionally printed books is expensive. It shouldn't be an issue with ebooks.

Except it is. For the customer, even in the digital realm, Amazon Japan is treated as a completely separate entity from Amazon US. For example, Amazon Japan carries the Japanese and English editions of Yokohama Shopping Log. Amazon US only has only the English edition.

By contrast, you can access both the Kadokawa BookWalker English and Japanese catalogs from a single account. And with yen exchange rates hitting lows not seen in forty years, Japanese ebooks are a bargain abroad. You can read BookWalker ebooks in a browser or by using their apps, which work like the Kindle Reader apps.

BookWalker has the English and Japanese ebooks for Yokohama Shopping Log on its respective websites. Granted, BookWalker is the storefront for a single publisher. But the only obstacle here is scale.

Amazon Web Services is the biggest cloud computing platform in the universe. Scale isn't a problem. Amazon could merge their ebook catalogs or take the single-login approach. Either way, "Mr. Bezos, tear down this e-wall!" (Yeah, I know, he's not really in charge anymore, but I couldn't resist the reference.)

Related links

BookWalker (English)
BookWalker (Japanese)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia