All 4 volumes of Shinozakisan ki-wo OTAshikani! arrived this week and i just picked them up. As strongly as I believe Amazon.jp is a poor choice, I believe Honto is a great choice. They were absolutely perfect. Cheap, reliable and prompt. However, they're not at all English-language friendly up front. People have written guides on how to get an account. If you want to read a manga in Japanese, Shinozaki is another one that has furigana (little kana) next to all the kanji. So, in essence, it's as easy as spoken Japanese, or more since you can type in the kana in a translator like google or babel fish and select the kanji you see and you know exactly which word is meant. I would strongly recommend people just starting out reading manga start with a manga like that. That said, I personally depended on raws for some pages, simply because even the main text was super, super tiny kanji and kana and done in a distorted way, making the furigana truly microscopic. It's possible to puzzle out even the tiny print pages, but you'll enjoy it more if you scan it or use a magnifier. For people who literally have not seen a tankôbon, they are like a western comic shrunk to 18 by 13 cm (about 7 x 5 in.) and Shinozaki is a little skinnier than that, and they're not made thicker, they're just that tiny. So they look fantastically detailed compared to one of the series online. I think looking at everything, the surprising amount of english on the cover, inside cover, and back inside, the varied typography, the frequent other product notices, the way they do the washes, the quality of the print considering the paper is medium quality, etc. will give you insight into those mangaka comics like watashino taisetsu na tomodachi or renai manga. Thanks to Honto it really didn't cost much to buy the complete Shinozaki so far, and it moves along. If you're reading in Japanese you don't want a slow moving story.
