kikeruka

Checking whether a book in a bookshop had an audiobook was tedious. Type the title, search Audible, then search audiobook.jp too. Do that book by book and you spend more time searching than looking at books.

But every book already carries an ISBN barcode. There was nothing to type — only something to scan. Once that landed, scanning became the whole interaction, and both services get checked in one go.

What changed was not search speed. Walking around a bookshop became fun again, because scanning anything that caught my eye costs nothing. I started stopping more often.

That leaves you holding books with no audiobook yet — and going back to check them yourself is the same chore all over again. So the app watches instead, and tells you when a release starts.

kikeruka watches two services, Audible and audiobook.jp, and works from ISBNs in Japanese book distribution. Books and audiobook services outside Japan are not supported.

The app is available in Japanese only, and there is no plan to localise it. We would rather say so here than let someone in a country we cannot serve assume it might work for them.