Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

There’s very interesting news on the Kindle front - Random House titles are now available for Kindle Global owners wherever Random House has rights.

That includes the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Before this Random House books were only available to Kindle owners in the US.

Some of the books now available -

1. Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol. 
2. Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.
3. Danielle Steel’s A Good Woman.  

Random House authors include Dean Koontz, Steig Larsson, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Pat Conroy, Colum McCann, Diana Gabaldon, Bill Bryson, Mitch Albom, Dominick Dunne and John Irving.

The Bookseller was one of the first sites to cover the news (press release at Amazon) and points out -

Random House UK was one of few notable publishers, which also included OUP and Macmillan, not to be included at the time of the international Kindle roll-out earlier this year.

No explanation was given at the time.

Well, thankfully, they’ve changed their mind and now all books published by Random House’s english-language divisions will be available for Kindle Global users in countries where Random House has rights.

This brings up another issue.

Kindle Global Owners confuse Book Rights with some sort of anti-user initiative

There have been two main complaints about the Kindle Global’s range of ebooks -

1. That a lot of titles are not available. 
2. That all books (including free ones) have an extra $2 charge.

The latter is related to bandwidth costs and is outside the scope of this post.

The former is really interesting because it’s not the fault of Amazon or even of the Publisher in the US.

• Book rights are auctioned out by territory – Publishers bid for rights.
• Different Publishers specialize in different markets.
• Different Publishers value different markets differently. 
• That means that often one Publisher gets US and Canada, a second gets UK and Europe, and perhaps a third Publisher gets South America and Australia.  

To sell ebooks in various countries Amazon has to negotiate an agreement with each of these Publishers -

• You get situations where Publishers delay international rights (like Random House did).
• You get situations where Publishers refuse to do ebooks.
• You get situations where prices are different i.e. sometimes the US Publisher charges more, sometimes the UK publisher charges more.

This leads to readers wrongly assuming that their country is getting ignored or is getting terrible prices.

Kindle Global was just launched a few months ago – give Amazon some time to work things out.

Kindle Store expands to 398,000 titles

There’s a second press release from Amazon noting that the Kindle Store -

1. Is now at 390,000 books.
2. Just got some great books for young readers including new titles of the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series and the Artemis Fowl series.

A search at Amazon will show that the actual number is 398,618. 

It’s good to see Amazon put more effort into children’s ebooks. It’s a hot area right now with Sesame Street, Scholastic and lots of other companies jumping into ebooks and also into making iPhone apps for children.

The Percy Jackson books sell really well and a movie based on the first book in the series is set to release in the US in February – it will star, amongst others, Uma Thurman and Pierce Brosnan.

Filed under: kindle international Tagged: | kindle global