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‘Kindle going global—very soon!!??’
May 20, 2009 | 7:41 am
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By David Rothman
The Kindle 2’s hardware design—that is, room for a SIM card-–suggests that a Euro launch of the 2 and the DX might happen in the near future. And now here’s another hint of Amazon’s international ambitions.
Amazon is leaning on publishers to include territorially related metadata in their files, according to the Kindle Nation blog published by our contributor Steve Windwalker.
Extrapolating from an Amazon note to publishers, Steve writes:
Amazon is getting close enough to launching the Kindle in countries other than the U.S. that the company is focusing on publisher contract and rights issues for those countries. In addition to being big news for prospective Kindle owners in those countries, this is also big for Kindle authors, publishers, and bloggers as well as American Kindle owners who may want to take advantage of international Whispernet connections in the future.
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Comments:
I guess Amazon is still smarting over the TTF fiasco and don’t want to do the *rational* thing and ask that teritoriality be phased out?
Too bad.
Whoops; TTS… Typo!
(Hmm, ability to edit posts would be nice.)
Just sayin’
Any news on Kindle for Canada?
I’m panting for it!!!
I believe that the last hope in particular, the Whispernet, will not happen very soon and very easily. At least in the EU the telephone rates and (more important) the providers are so many and varied that a free Whispernet-like proviso would be akin to economical suicide. If you think that were I to be on holiday in France with my mobile phone and wished to call a friend in France, my call would be routed first to Italy to my provider via a French provider and then back to France. That is not all, as the French friend would be very annoyed with me, as he would have to pay too for an apparent international call.
So if I were a British or a German (the only places where Amazon has a shop) I would have to be very very careful where I shop for my books, or the downloading costs could amount to more that what the books were worth.
That is the situation now. I am curious though, to see if it can evolve.
Several new devices will appear this summer, a new Bebook (Hanlin), the Cybook Opus, the Cooler ereader.. all of these will be available in the EU. Bebook will have a ‘whispernet’ of its own, and offer sd-card expansions for older versions to enable those to have wireless as well. Amazon is late.