Update: Kindle Germany, France and Europe is here. An international kindle for $279 has been released. It ships from the US so add on shippping and custom duties to get a total of $345 (217 pounds).
The countries that get Kindle include -
- Most of Europe.
- 174 countries worldwide. Only 81 of these get WhisperNet and these don’t get free Internet.
Check out my Kindle 2 International Review guide for more details and advice.
We now know why Amazon was adding newspapers from Europe to the Kindle Store.
Why is Amazon adding 2 German newspapers (Handlesblatt, WirtschaftsWoche ) to the Kindle Store?
The Newspapers section of the Kindle Store now has -
- 2 French language newspapers.
- 2 German language newspapers (added today).
- 1 Italian Language newspaper (added very recently — 2 weeks ago).
The evidence that Kindle 2 is going international grows stronger.
The number of Kindle & Kindle 2 owners in Germany, Italy and France couldn’t be that high. Nor could the number of French and German speaking Americans.
That indicates one of three possibilities -
- Kindle 2 is going to go international soon and Amazon is readying up content. The list of countries targeted (a lot of the european countries) indicates that Europe is the first market Amazon will expand to. Canada (hopefully) would be next.
- Kindle 2 was supposed to be an international release and carrier negotiations in Europe broke down. Amazon decided to go ahead and license European content anyways (hoping that they would be able to work out agreements sooner rather than later).
- Mark Fidelman at Seeking Alpha has it right, and Amazon is looking at Publishing + Distributing Content, and not the Kindle 2, as their primary product -
Amazon (AMZN) is doing a head fake. The company wants us to concentrate on the Kindle hardware while in fact it is cleverly moving into the book publishing and social networking spaces.
My money is on Option 1. Evidence keeps mounting up that Kindle 2 is going international soon – perhaps as soon as summer 2009.
Filed under: availability, kindle 2 Tagged: | kindle france, kindle germany, kindle italy
