From the Amazon press release:
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that authors and publishers around the world can now use the self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers worldwide in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Now, authors and publishers outside the United States can take advantage of this same opportunity and start offering their books to Kindle customers at http://dtp.amazon.com.
“We are excited to make the self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform available to authors and publishers around the world,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. “Now any content owner can offer English, German or French-language books to the fast-growing audience of Kindle owners around the globe.”
Additional language options with DTP will be added in the coming months. To learn more about the Kindle Digital Text Platform visit http://dtp.amazon.com.
What Amazon now needs to do, to go forward with this initiative, is to accept UTF-8 encoding, and upgrade the Kindle’s font to include glyphs for the entire unicode set. I’m not sure how many fonts do support the entire set, though. But open-source licensed fonts that would look good on the Kindles and that support a whole lot of the unicode set are certainly out there.
Such a font might take up more memory, I’m not sure about that.
But without UTF-8 support, I wonder how many languages the International Kindle would be able to handle. Entities in html only go so far, after all.
Since Amazon has made a few steps in this direction, starting with the international edition of the ereader itself, I expect that unicode support will come along within a year, probably with a new generation of Kindles.
Multibyte fonts, localization, UTF-8 encoding handling on real products are not that easy. Those thing usually takes around 5 to 10 years. Just ask those OS engineers in Apple or Microsoft.
Waiting for other language options.