Mikio Amaya, CEO of Papyless Co., which is a Tokyo-based e-book provider, said Japan has more publishers compared to the United States, so it is hard to gather content.

U.S. content-providers can collect a lot of content if they can convince five or six major publishers to work with them, Amaya said, adding there are more than 2,000 publishers in Japan, including about 50 major ones.

Despite these numbers, Japan’s e-book market has been growing.

According to Impress R&D, a Tokyo-based market researcher, Japan’s e-book market in fiscal 2008 saw sales of ¥46.4 billion, which is a 31 percent increase from the previous year.

In fiscal 2004, the market posted a mere ¥4.5 billion in sales.

Amaya, whose company sells more than 127,000 books, also pointed out that computerizing Japanese documents is both time-consuming and costly.

“The optical character-reader can read English better,” said Amaya, adding that Japanese has more characters due to its kanji system so documents have to be carefully checked by humans.

While Amazon seems confident about bringing Kindle to Japan, the device itself is not Japan’s first choice for reading e-books.

Impress said 86 percent of e-book sales went to cell phones in fiscal 2008, while much of the rest went to personal computers.

Amazon says it is hoping to convince Japanese publishers to star selling digital versions of their books. In the meantime, it would seem that the Kindle is unable to read Japanese characters. Testing has found that the existing unicode font hack for the Kindle 2 does not work on the new Kindle 2 International, although an updated hack will probably be released soon.

BlogKindle.com is reporting that Kindle International users in the UK have found that they are able to browser Wikipedia without any problems. Someone in Sweden has found out that they too can use the Kindle International to browse Wikipedia, but they are prevented from accessing anything other than English language Wikipedia articles.

Folks in Japan who pre-ordered the International wireless version of the Kindle should be getting it in the mail sometime in the next couple days. If anyone has already received it, please leave a comment on this post and share your experiences with its wireless browsing features!

Update: I Just noticed this comment in an Amazon.com discussion thread. A new Kindle owner in Japan says that he can avoid the international book price mark-up when browsing from a U.S. IP address:

I can now buy US content and choose to pay transfer fees or not – the key is my purchasing IP address. If I try from my home PC it will not work, if I use a computer from work (where our Internet Connection is routed via the US) it does work. So my assesment is that the CC billing has little to do with it, it is where Amazon think you physically are that seems to be key. The interesting thing now would be for a true US user to try placing an order from overseas and see if they get US or ínternational ‘pricing’. I will have to check with a friend on that.

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