Kindle News: PCWorld - Why isn't the Kindle Fire global yet? Today's free Kindle books

First, today's sets of temporarily-free Kindle books selected and listed by Kindle forum members. April 1 books (no joke)
  As of this morning, it's already almost 300 newly free books.
  And then there's the ongoing Kindle Daily Deal ('White Witch')

The Kindle Fire and global (non)availability
PCWorld's Jeff Bertolucci asks what many outside the U.S. have been asking: "If Amazon's tablet is so popular, why is it only available in the United States?"

They point out that the Kindle Touch 3G  E-Ink reader will be available on April 27 in 175 countries and territories, but nothing at all has been said about the Kindle Fire.

One thing many of us have thought of is a point made by Bertolucci -- Amazon's streaming video and audio and apps too have not been available outside the U.S. as there are complex geo-based digital rights involved and you'd wonder what the advantage would be for those in other countries.  He points out that it would be a Kindle Fire without Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora and Amazon Prime, or whatever international equivalents of those apps.

Amazon did invest heavily in the last 1.5 years in a popular video streaming outfit overseas seen as "the Netflix of Europe -- LoveFilm - See the earlier article on that.

IDC analyst Bob O'Donnell told PCWorld via email :

' My guess is that they don't have foreign-language video and music content deals lined up, and those are much more important for the Fire [than for the E-ink Kindle Touch].. There could be issues about localising apps as well.'

All that does make sense. "Localising" means adapting software for a specific region or language.

Bertolucci adds:

' Another possibility is that Amazon's cloud storage facilities aren't ready to handle millions of new global customers who want to store their digital content, including books, movies, music, and apps, on Amazon's servers. '

A recent Kindle forum thread is a discussion by a few Kindle owners who have managed to download (or upload to Amazon servers) 16,000 to 20,000 Kindle books each, due to the abundance of free books offered.

  Their Kindles' Archived Items folders will of course have problems handling listing 16-20,000 titles, so they don't use the WiFi as much, but it appears that the Amazon ManageYourKindle page on the web is also affected by the data for that many Kindle books needing to be accessed for tabular listings of 20K books when they log on to try to find things in their Amazon libraries.

  So Bertolucci probably has a good point there.

He also mentions that while the price of the Kindle Fire is seen as a good one here, global customers would probably pay much more, citing the Kindle Touch 3G pricing of £169 in the UK, $268 US equivalent.



Kindle Touch 3G, US-only   Kindle Touch WiFi (US)   Kindle Touch WiFi-Only, outside US    Kindle Basic   (UK: KBasic)   Kindle Fire
Kindle Keybd 3G   (UK: Kindle Keybd 3G)   K3 Special Offers   K3-3G Special Offers   DX

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Check often: Temporarily-free recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

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1) Amazon's exclusive rights to 2 Covey ebooks. 2) Australian lament

NY Times's Brad Stone and Motoko Rich report that Stephen R. Covey, "one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights to two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster ... to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year."

Amazon will have exclusive rights to sell e-book versions of 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' and 'Principle-Centered Leadership.'

  He also plans, the NYTimes said, to "gradually make other e-books available exclusively to Amazon, which will promote them on its Web site."

Hardcover publishers are already unhappy with Amazon's low Kindle book pricing and are collaborating to withhold e-book versions of new releases for four months, as they feel they cut into hardcover sales at those prices.  I think that withholding these until reviews come in, and until people will have lost initial excitement about a no-longer new release, will just cut into e-book sales and decrease their bottom line.

Publishers are also trying to claim exclusive rights to publish e-editions of decades-older works while authors and agents feel the digital rights reside with the author, since electronic rights were not explicitly spelled out earlier.

' On Friday, Random House sent a letter to dozens of literary agents stating that on all backlist books, it retained “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”

But the younger Mr. Covey noted that Franklin Covey was also experimenting with self-publishing new books, another way of cutting out the traditional print publisher. '

UNAVAILABILITY OF MANY BOOKS FOR AUSTRALIA
PCAuthority's Stuart Turton bemoans the number of desirable books not available to Australians for the Kindle International but blames it on the Amazon Kindle format when it's a matter of publisher digital-rights in each of the countries.  He also laments the lack of Kindle versions of books by JK Rowling, but the fact is that she won't allow her books to be released in any e-book format.

He's aware though that "On the bright side, Amazon's finest does support Mobipocket and TXT files, at least allowing you to download free eBooks from Project Gutenberg and its ilk."  Since Project Gutenberg's collection is about 30,000 books, not to mention what's offered by "its ilk" (including half a million free Google books that are easily auto-converted to Kindle format), a lot of reading can be done while publishers are encouraged to straighten out this situation.

Writing with tongue-in-cheek partially, he does recognize you can "crowbar" PDFs, DOCs and RTF's onto the Kindle by a conversion process but doesn't realize that PDFs can just go directly onto it the way plain text files can.

' These flaws are all the more infuriating because the Kindle's hardware is staggeringly good. The keyboard offers a handy way to search and add notes to books, and the little joystick can be used to highlight text, navigate menus and bring up definitions of words from the Oxford American Dictionary.

We're particularly amused by the text-to-speech feature, which veers from being mildly useful one minute, to doing impressions of HAL having a heart attack the next. [ Good description! ]

More relevant is the 1.4GB of usable storage and a 532MHz ARM processor that ensures the Kindle moves faster than a cheetah being shot out of a cannon, although it tends to get bogged down when dealing with image-heavy PDFs.

However, the pick of the technological litter is undoubtedly the 6in E Ink screen, which renders in 16 shades of grey. It's hard to explain the difference this makes without seeing it in action, but it softens and deepens the picture immeasurably. '

Amazon doesn't include photographs with international editions of subscriptions and told him that they need to keep the price of subscriptions lower.  Turton feels it has more to do with "avoiding excessive data charges" until a better wireless network situation is in place -- but the two do go together.  If data charges are higher, of course the subscription cost would have to be also.  I'm in agreement with him though that the subscriptions are unattractive without the accompanying photographs.  He sums up this woeful (as he puts it) posting with:

' Which sums up our feelings towards the Kindle as a whole. The Kindle feels like a device whose brilliant hardware has been short-changed by Amazon's thwarted ambition.

Had the store offered a wider selection of titles, or the device not been so totally dependent on it, the Kindle's Performance rating would be up there with that of its Features & Design. '

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Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!