Is anybody else excited about this? Google Book Search

[yojimbo1]

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/

Sure I have some Japanese books but this will be fascinating when I can actually read some of this stuff.

This brings me to another thought; how many years until books become public domain in Japan? 70, 80 years? Since most of these books with the full view available will be that old how much have the kanji and the language in general changed in the written form? The common use kanji were standardized in, what the 1940's?, so I can expect to see no or very little furigana.

[richvh]

A pretty fair number of public domain books are already available through Aozora Bunko, a Japanese equivalent to Project Gutenberg.

[coco]

Welcome to TJP.

yojimbo1 wrote:
how many years until books become public domain in Japan? 70, 80 years?

The copyright protects for 50 years after the death of the author under the Berne Convention. But there is a movement to extend the duration of copyright.

The common use kanji were standardized in, what the 1940's?,

The current 常用漢字 was enacted in 1981.

[8werner8]

"Google Book Search" is a great tool for searching. But you shouldn't limit yourself to full view books. There are not that many of them and they are (for the most part) old and certainly not the stuff a first-time reader (Japanese) should use.

When you find a book that you like it's usually well worth the 10 bucks or so to buy it.

[nukemarine]

In addition, there are many sites with fan fiction or books you can read. http://works.bookstudio.com/ is a site with user submitted stories/novels that's broken down into categories. You read it with rikaichan or just print them out and read them on the go.

I'm still using http://dramanote.seesaa.net/ though as I like the one two punch of watching a drama then reading the equivalent of a mini-novel of the episode.