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SA consumers have access to 230 000 electronic books on Amazon.com’s online store at launch. That’s the word from the company’s director of Kindle Books, Laura Porco (pictured), who was in Johannesburg on Monday to brief the media about the product’s availability in SA.
The Kindle went on sale worldwide on Monday at a cost of US$279 (excluding shipping costs and country-specific taxes). It is available in more than 100 countries, though the product is shipped directly to customers from the US.
E-books are downloaded wirelessly over 3G networks. The Kindle does not need a Sim card. Rather, it connects seamlessly to mobile operators’ networks. There are no data charges associated with downloading books.
It’s not known which operator or operators Amazon is working with in SA, though it has indicated it is working with AT&T’s worldwide roaming partners — in SA, that’s both MTN and Vodacom.
Porco says the 230 000 e-books available to SA customers represent about 62% of the books available to US consumers. US buyers have access to 370 000 e-books. Amazon launched the Kindle in the US two years ago with a catalogue of 90 000 books. Porco says Amazon is adding “thousands of books a day” to the store.
She says Amazon has been “astounded” at how many e-books it has sold to date, though she declines to provide sales statistics. She says that where both an e-book and a paper book are available in Amazon’s store, the company sells on average 48 electronic versions of the book for every 100 paper versions.
All international newspapers on the Kindle, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are available to SA consumers. No SA papers are available yet.
Porco says a larger-screen version of the Kindle, the Kindle DX, will go on sale internationally some time in 2010. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
I think this is a great product. I will certaily get myself one and get to read the best books from all corners of the world. I hope to feature a promotion on my competitions blog (www.luckysters.com) that will be giving away the product to lucky South Africans.
Themba
Editor
http://www.luckysters.com
Amazon has to expand its international footprint and offerings with Barnes and Noble, Sony and soon Apple nipping at its heels. Would have been good to learn little more about the product and whether it only supports drm kindle downloads. Still an almost 1:2 ratio of online to print sales is amazing for a technology that is still so immature and which may do to books what the Ipod did to CDs.
If you are going to get an ebook reader get the Sony instead. The Kindle is great if you want to be tied to Amazon for your books but the last thing you want is vendor lock-in on the books you read.
The Sony Reader is shop-agnostic and lets you load all the popular ebook formats on it, including word docs and PDF and you can do this via USB. I blogged about it here: http://www.vincentmaher.com/?p=934 and no, I don’t work for Sony and they don’t send me free stuff