Amazon Launches GSM-based International Kindle Device | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Launches GSM-based International Kindle Device

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28 pointsrbranson24 comments

Looking at amazon.com's store, many books are not available in Europe .e.g. "The Angel's Game" or even Dan Brown's latest. Comparing the top sellers list (assuming you buy a Kindle hoping to get new books for $10 kindle prize rather than $25 local imported paperback price), only 23 out of top 59 books are available in UK (this I found by sorting by bestseller in the store with region set to Europe and US accordingly -- the order matches up, except for the gaps).

I'm going to wait until the International Kindle is up on Amazon.co.uk -- buying anything from outside of EU for me personally is probably more expensive than waiting for it to arrive in UK, even though the price will likely be higher. You've got VAT, you've got customs and you get a $25 customs fee and VAT on top of customs fee. And of course, you're paying VAT and customs on the shipping charge as well.

I'm still happy it's finally here although I wonder about bookstores. Do you Kindle owners still go in, browser a bookstore and buy books at random? Even though I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon it's mostly professional books or hard-to-find paperbacks. I still go into bookstores several times a month and just browse at random at highlights or new editions.

"many books are not available in Europe (...) even Dan Brown's latest."

I call this a feature

These licensing restrictions are just plain stupid. I wrote a (provocative) blog post about this recently (http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/9/17/why-i-will-steal-mus...).

Why not make the same content available worldwide? I mean, it's just bits for money, and my money isn't worth less than somebody else's money.

funny, they will ship to Uganda, but not Canada

yup, looks like Canadians are screwed by licensing again.

is it because of licensing? my first thought was they weren't able to get a deal with Rogers.

Bell/Telus have HSPA as of November, so maybe something's coming later?

Should be. For Canada they say they are working to bring us the Kindle. They don't say that for all countries.

I believe it has do with lawyers and book licensing and not the telcos this time.

this is the 6 inch version. Hopefully they'll launch the international dx version soon. It will be HUGE in India if it works as well as advertised.

Why will it be huge in India? For textbooks, typically you can get cheaper south-asia only editions. Many engineering books go for $10 for example. Newspapers are about $10-$15 per year. So I don't see why this will be particularly hit in India?

"For textbooks, typically you can get cheaper south-asia only editions. Many engineering books go for $10 for example. Newspapers are about $10-$15 per year. "

Ok Why don't you find me an Indian Edition of "Coders At Work?". ;-)

More seriously you are (somewhat) right. Some books (most popular technical books eventually become available in cheap Indian editions. If all books available on the Kindle had a cheap Indian edition, your argument would have merit. There are two advantages to the Kindle over waiting for the Indian Edition of a textbook (if it ever comes out), time and convenience.

First technical books, there are large numbers of technical books that are not available in Indian Edition. Buying from Amazon isn't an option because the postage costs ramps up the price. (the "2 day" shipping option doubles the price. For heavier books Amazon ads an extra 10 $ to ship to India.The lesser options often result in the book not being delivered because it got "lost" somewhere in transit). So if you order from Amazon (and many many people do, in spite of the delays and the cost , because they have no chpoice), the added postage fee more than cancels any discount.

Often the Indian edition books are released upto a year or more after the foreign edition is released and the paper and print quality is really sucky (to make it cheap I imagine.)

Give me an option of instant purchase (today you have to order books form India and wait for weeks to see how important this is) and I'd choose that in flash. Indian booksellers often take months to deliver a book not in the store inventory. Indian booksellers suck. Even an "Amazon India" would destroy them if it existed.

And as for textbooks specifically only a minor subset of the good textbooks in say Mechanical Engineering is available in Indian Edition. The situation is better for "Perl in 21 days" type software books.

For example Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach " 3d edition is slated for release at the end of 2009 in the USA. I don't expect to see it in a cheap Indian Edition till the end of 2010.

I maintain that if the Kindle works well in India in terms of connectivity and so on (this remains to be seen), it will be a huge disruptive force in bookselling. Indian publishing houses are still in the 19th century as far as technology and distribution are concerned.

Some of my friends were trying to set up an e-publishing startup with a kindle like device and did some market research on this. (They didn't get funding which is another story entirely).

Well, at my university, the common solution was to go to the library, borrow the book and then get it photocopied. Copyright infringement? Probably. Cost effective: yes.

I don't know a whole lot of students in India who will spend $260 for their textbooks over their entire undergrad let alone spend $260 on a ebook reader and then spend a lot of money buying books.

However, kindle may become popular with professionals perhaps.

I used several photocopied books when at university. Basically someone would run off one copy of the relevant chapters, then we'd take that to a copy shop and they'd run off a dozen copies of it double sided and bind it nicely. A lot of people did it and no one ever said anything.

Precisely. I think cost matters to students more than convenience in most cases.

How noticeable is the difference? I've been waiting for an international release for some time now, but the fact that it's only the 6 inch version leaves me a bit unsatisfied...

I read a review here in Hacker News (can't find the link now) that the dx is much better in dealing with PDF. And I have a lot of pdf docs and papers. (here's a link about pdf on the dx http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical-doc...)

Looks like we're on the same boat then, I'd buy it mainly for the truckload of technical PDFs I've downloaded and only partially read...

I've also been seriously considering it, but it's hard to justify the cost when you can get a laptop like this for $400..

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptop/hp-mini-311.aspx?page...

Yup, that could be a solution too, but I think that a dedicated device is better suited for this task. I could read the papers on my home PC (although the laptop offers something more than the desktop, mobility), but I'd like to avoid the...multitasking that a full-fledged computer offers! It's definitely another option though, and one that I'll take into consideration if and when the DX is made available outside of the US. As it stands, I think that compared to a 6 inch device a netbook is superior.

The price point is way too high for mainstream usage in India. The actual price in India is $435 ($289 base price, $42 for shipping, and $104 for import duty!!).

I wonder if there will be a hack to buy a US Kindle and then use it locally here in India.

whoa 104$ import duty! That's half the price of the device. Bleh. I take back my "will be hit" prediction. This will be a miserable failure (in India). But they are probably not targeting India at all I guess. Possibly Europe or Japan?

It would be a lot smarter to unbundle it from the unlimited wireless connectivity forever plan. The device would be cheaper and users could decide how much (or how little) they want to spend on connectivity. I also bet slashing the cost of the perpetual wireless could allow Amazon to include wifi, making moot my whole point here.

They also dropped the price of the US Kindle 2 from $299 to $259.

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