Several people have e-mailed me about the use of a Kindle outside the U.S. I haven’t made any overseas trips since I got mine, but obviously the wireless capability disappears once you leave America. Amazon covers this in one of its FAQs and asks customers outside the U.S. to be patient.
There are, of course, workarounds to the situation. This post on the Nerdgirl site does an excellent job providing a step-by-step solution. It involves the use of an Amazon Gift Card although you still need to provide a valid credit card during the setup process. The trick is you must enter a U.S. address for the credit card, even if that’s not really your address. Amazon apparently doesn’t confirm the credit card billing address unless you actually use it to buy a book…for now.
I think it’s great that workarounds like this exist, but it’s important to note that Amazon could change their registration policy at any time and then you’d be hosed…until someone else comes up with a new strategy!
Honestly, knowing how great the reading experience is, if I lived in another country I too would be using any workaround I could find to use my Kindle outside the U.S.!
The iLiad is available anywhere in the world. And the reading experience on it is quite good. It supports Mobipocket (if your tastes run towards closed formats) as well as a variety of open formats.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t havee tight integration with a 900lb retailer like Amazon. And, as you are aware,the experience on the Kindle will be less good when Amazon decides they’re done providing access to the books you’ve “bought.” Or, if you prefer, when Amazon decides to “pull a Yahoo!.”
http://newteleread.com/wordpress/blog/2008/07/29/whoops-stung-by-drm-haters-yahoo-offers-refunds-or-mp3-in-wake-of-music-service-shutdown-announcement/
It would be nice if publishers like JW&S simply made their content available for sale, in open formats, at reasonable prices. Then anyone with any ebook reader could buy content direct from the publisher (eliminating the middle-man), and we wouldn’t have to worry about our ebooks suddenly “going dark” when the provider decides to pull the plug on the license for our texts. (Or when I loose my device, or format my hard drive, or whatever calamity is guaranteed to strike my electronic devices.)
If publishers want to remain relevant in the coming years, they are going to need to make themselves valuable to authors. Your job as a publisher is to help me edit my text and promote it to readers. (Actually, your job is to increase the bottom line for your publishing house, but that’s besides the point.) As an author, I really don’t care what kind of ebook reader my readers use: I just want my content in as many readers’ hands as possible. And I really don’t want DRM screwing up their experience.
I have a thorough review of Irex Iliad on my web-site. It is covering Iliad v1, yet it seems relevant to v2 as well.
Bottom line seems to be that Iliad positioned as a replacement for a tablet PC and not as a reading device. As such it can be great, but it cannot compete with Kindle – these two are just two different kinds of devices. The review is here:
http://www.alexonlinux.com/irex-technologies-iliad-together-more-than-a-year