I have came to the realization that how I buy books might be a form of gambling.
I read a fair bit of books, which would have been a relatively low cost hobby except I like to read Japanese books in physical printed form, and I don't live in Japan. Shipping is expensive, so I try to amortize that cost by waiting for multiple books to be released and then buying in large batches from Amazon Japan. This strategy worked relatively well until this year, when Amazon ceased to have any of their own inventory for all the books I wanted to buy, not even for pre-orders.
Maybe Amazon has some systematic failure in their inventory management. Maybe the scalpers just got that much faster than actual customers in buying up all available stock, and are reselling those books back on Amazon's marketplace just to rub it in. Maybe Amazon is getting out of the business of selling physical books and is planning to go all-in on e-books. Or maybe Amazon is back to using old technology and just stopped shipping stuff, yea, like that one pre-order I made 6 months before the release date and have yet to see a ship date weeks after the release date. All I know is that Amazon Japan is no longer a good place to buy books.
Kinokuniya seemed like a good alternative, especially since I used to buy books from them until their physical stores withered. Kinokuniya didn't seem promising at first because Kinokuniya USA prices add up to more than what some Amazon scalpers charges -- each book is about double the base cost of publisher's listed price, plus $6 per book for shipping, plus $23 per order for processing. But Kinokuniya Japan is a very different place, with entirely fair prices and good inventory. It seemed promising except at no point during the entire ordering workflow had they shown a properly formatted shipping address. I wasn't sure if I would be paying for books or an expensive lesson... but I did get my books after much anxious waiting. All cheer for Kinokuniya!
At some point during my saga of buying books, a random thought crossed my mind -- There is a traditional game called Koi-Koi, where player can win as soon as they have a hand of sufficient value, or they can wait for the right cards to come and form a hand of greater value later. I could have ordered books in smaller batches, but I have always waited, because I always had (misplaced) confidence that a more cost-effective batch order can be formed later. Once I saw this similarity, I wondered if what really got me to buy books was the uncertainty that I might not be able to get those books. It's a variable reward schedule, which is a factor for gambling addiction.
Fortunately, besides no-inventory-but-good-website Amazon and the has-inventory-but-janky-website Kinokuniya, there is still Amiami. Amiami has always done batch-shipping right by decoupling the (pre-)ordering and shipping steps, and they seem to be taking pre-orders for some books now. Amiami will save me from becoming a gambling addict. Or make me a greater bibliomanic, who knows. Coincidentally, the very first book I bought from Amazon Japan was Read or Die, so maybe I was already in deep since long ago.
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