Kindle Goes Global
The e-book world is on fire and the latest move by Amazon will fan the flames on a global basis. The company has dropped the price of the Kindle 2 to $259 and added a global GSM version running on the AT&T network. The new international version ($279) will bring Kindle books to the market outside the U. S. and will work in over 100 countries according to AT&T:
“Kindle has revolutionized the way we purchase and read books, by making it mobile, easy and intuitive,” said Randall Stephenson, chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T. “We are excited to work with Amazon to help readers access books even faster and from significantly more places than ever before, including more than 100 countries and territories around the world through AT&T’s global wireless coverage.”
Om Malik is going to get one of the new Kindles for his Mom in India.
(via CrunchGear)
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Yes, but you missed the fine print – $1.99 per download of item from the archives or when buying a new book when abroad.
Sounds to me like this is aimed at American travelers, not an international audience (if it is, we’re getting well and truly rogered again, as usual.)
Good point. I notice that none of the press materials indicates you can actually BUY books abroad, only that you can “access” them. We should get clarification shortly, I imagine.
We (those of us outside the US) are getting rogered — especially those of us who write for a living. My analysis.
Note that these are shipping from the US, are only available from Amazon.com (for now) and they only ship with a US power adapter which is 100% useless for the rest of the world.
It looks like the $1.99 roaming charge may only apply to travelling US Kindle users but it’s not really clear yet.
In short, this is a pretty pathetic attempt at an international release by Amazon. They should have waited to have everything in place for a true international release before making this announcement.
While not disagreeing with your conclusion, I think it’s worth pointing out that Amazon’s power adapter is a microUSB cable plus USB-> US Power socket adapter. USB is everywhere to the point where I wouldn’t call it 100% useless… heck, the ability to charge over USB is a driving factor for me in what I buy. :)
If anything that makes it worse if all they had to do was ship with an adapter that was appropriate to the region they are selling to.
This is probably one of the most extreme examples of the kind of contempt that US companies often show the rest of the world. Too often products are shipped out with mangled English, incomprehensible date formats, etc. Americans would (rightly) expect that a product sold to them was properly regionalised and there’s no reason for the rest of the world to expect anything less. It’s a bit sad that Amazon think they can dump their product on us without bothering to get these things right.
Also, US adapters aren’t 100% useless in foreign countries. They’ll work at least in Japan. I have all my ‘merican junk plugged into the walls over here.
Once again we have global companies acting like local shops.
I’ve been ready to go download only on my media ever since I bought my xbox but DRM is worse now then it was 3 years ago.
Thank goodness for torrent sites.
There might some good news for some of the other jkontherun readers.
I just read on an italian newspaper that you can preorder the kindle in italy and several other countries now. There appears to be no set date but seems Amazon is doing at least some baby steps.
Canada is not part (at the moment) of this new Global Kindle. Probably waiting for Bell to officially go GSM.
Honestly, I’m not a prospective Kindle customer anyway, even if they made it available internationally under the exact same terms as in the US, the surcharges they mention just make the decision that much easier. Buying DRM:ed books that not only are DRM:ed but can be erased off my device remotely at Amazon’s whim is just not going to happen. I personally hope the Kindle would fail abysmally, but unfortunately I think that ship has already sailed.
I’ll just keep up the tree slaughter and load my shelves down with books and buy more ebooks from Baen who do it right, with no DRM.
I’ve put together a table with international Kindle details that lists every country in which Kindle is available along with number of books, their pricing, wireless availability etc
One of the problems that Amazon is likely facing in an international release is that publishing rights are not global. Books are typically licenced to be published by different publishers in different countries so to make a book licensed for publication in England available via the American store would cause cause them major headaches. The last thing they want to have to tell a users again is that “we have to remove that version of the book from your Kindle because it wasn’t supposed to be sold to you”. We all know how well that went last time. Just like newspapers, the publishing industry is going ot have to deal with the new reality of the Internet as a widely used delivery mechanism.
Bah! Amazon is just driving Canadian consumers further and further into the “loving” arms of Sony, Barnes & Noble, as well as the many fine purveyors of epub.
Sure there are telecommunications issues here, but it looks to me like somebody didn’t look up what country is America’s biggest trading partner – yes, bigger than China, I looked it up. You would think North American coverage would have been a priority …