Kindle News: Amazon Canada launches, Amazon China too

AMAZON CANADA LAUNCHES, FINALLY! and AMAZON CHINA gets a beta store

Canada
I first heard about Canada's Amazon store launch being imminent from Nate Hoffelder, who's also written about the China launch after being prepared for it since he noticed the Paperwhite's User Manual was available in Mandarin.

  I see the basic Kindle is on sale on Amazon Canada's front page, though they direct the interested to Amazon U.S.'s International product page for Canada.


  The wording, with no date on when it was posted, reads:

' Over 1,560,000 English-language books to choose from; plus U.S. and international newspapers and magazines are available for your country.  Because publishers give us eBook rights on a country by country basis, available titles for your country will vary from our current U.S selection.  We are actively working with publishers to get the rights to all titles for every country and adding this selection every day.  Check the Kindle Store to see available titles.

Low Book Prices: New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases are $11.99, unless marked otherwise.  You'll also find many books for less - over 135,000 titles are priced under $5.99 '

No app store or mention of Kindle Fire tablets.  Also, the Kindle Paperwhite has a waiting period in the States (not in stock until Dec. 20 here), so that may be a reason it's not showing in the Canada store at this point.


China
The Kindle e-readers aren't being sold IN China or in the U.S. at this point! Below is what C/NET's Jeff Eisenhauer and Lance Whitney are seeing so far.

  There are about 25,000 books, but Dangdang, a major retailer there, offers around 100,000.

 Currently, in watching the forums, I've seen that consumers in China have bought Kindles from other countries, as C/NET writes.

  While the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire, as well as two other Kindle devices, did receive, Whitney says, regulatory approval from the State Radio Regulation of China (he cites Reuters), there are apparently some obstacles to these being ready right away, as I've read for the last few weeks.
`
  Whitney adds that "Despite not having an official Kindle e-reader for the Chinese market, Amazon is encouraging customers to get the Kindle app for their iOS or Android mobile devices. Just don't expect to get the app through the Amazon website, since the Amazon app store is not yet available in China. Nevertheless, it's a good idea to put the app on the recently available iPhone 5 or iPad Mini."

  In the meantime, U.S. residents can choose from approximately 1,480+ Kindle books in Chinese that are in the Foreign Language Books area of the U.S. store.



  For daily free ebooks, check the following links:

Temporarily-free books - Non-classics USA: by:    Publication Date      Bestselling   High-ratings UK: PubDate   Popular The Kindle Daily Deal What is 3G? and "WiFi"?       Battery Care Highly-rated under $1,  Newest: $1-$2, $2-$3

Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):    Top 100 free UK-Only:    Top 100 free Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. USEFUL for your Kindle Keyboard (U.S. only, currently):   99c Notepad 1.1,   99c Calculator,   99c Calendar,   99c Converter

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button
Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

Read foreign-language Google-books in English online

This article started as a forum-post in reply to the question:
  "Can you guys post any good books you're finding through Google? Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't find anything decent."
  Several other forum members had the same experience when trying to find books that interested them.

  I think it's that Kindle users have already found so many good public domain books or "classics" (for free or under $1) just on Amazon alone (7,000+) and then at Project Gutenberg (30,000), MobileReference, feedbooks, manybooks.net (mnybks.net direct-to-Kindle), fictionwise, etc., that most we'll find now are duplicates.

  I hadn't looked, beyond doing the blog-entry the other day about converting Google ePub public-domain books to Kindle-readable ones.

WHAT SEEMS AVAILABLE
  I just now went to Google Books and, from the categories shown at the left column there, I chose "Literature."

  This brought up the first-30 of 1,805 results under that 'literature' category.

  Seeing all the attractive, colorful pictures of covers that resulted, I realized these probably include a lot of books that are being SOLD rather than just free public domain ones.
  Looking up at the pull-down menu, I saw that it said:
      "Showing: Limited preview and fullview"
  which means this search result includes books you have to buy.

  So, I changed the pull-down menu to the choice:
      "Showing: Full view only"
  (which is available only for free, public domain books and magazines).
  And then, most of the covers seen now were the plain, generic types, for the most part, and included books in other languages.
  They should have searches limitable to a certain language!

  Even then, this resulted in only 42 books, with maybe half or more of them in other languages.  I realize Google said they included libraries from all over the world, but ...

  THEN I changed the pull-down menu to show the option:
      "Showing: All books"
  This got me some rather esoteric selections. Since I love the singing of a baritone named William Sharp, I whimsically clicked on a book on the front page (that claimed 4,424 books listed) titled:
      "The sexual tensions of William Sharp"   :-)
  and saw the following description of that book (excerpted below)
=======
Title   The sexual tensions of William Sharp: a study of the birth of Fiona Macleod, incorporating two lost works, Ariadne in Naxos and "Beatrice"
Volume 2 of Studies in nineteenth-century British literature
Volume 2 of Studies in Modern Poetry
Author Terry L. Meyers
Publisher P. Lang, 1996
Original from the University of Michigan
Digitized Mar 13, 2008"
...
=======

So, I guess these million books include esoteric academic treatments of various topics, not a bad feature! and generally not available in the usual public domain offerings elsewhere.  They also include old magazines.

Note that there are a lot of categories on the front page's left column.  Also, the front page displays an assortment of the type of books or magazines available and are grouped in the following way:

Interesting
Classics
Magazines
Highly cited
Random Subject - (This changes each time -- was "Alcoholics Fiction")


TRANSLATING books written in another language:
SO, I decided to go back to 'Literature" and see if I could produce a Google translation of one of these books written in another language, and sure enough Google has made it possible, although there is currently no option saying "translate" on the page.

I chose one of the Italian books on the front page of the public-domain books search-results:
  "Scritti letterari di un Italiano vivente (1847) by Giuseppe Mazzini "

  I browsed through it until I came to a page that began with a new paragraph which I thought would be a good example for a translation.  I chose page 24.

  In our case, knowing which page we want, we don't have to tediously arrow through each page.  You can just enter '24' in the input box there, press your Enter key, and it'll take you to page 24.

 What you'll see there is the scanned image that Google made from that page.

  But they also give us the option to see this in "Plain text" -- so I clicked on that option above the text.

 This took me to the version showing the plain text from pages 20-24 (see top left there).

  In the web browser's URL/or Location Field, the long URL for the plain-text Italian version was:
    http://books.google.com/books?ei=zbqYSqGUOp7CzQSwh-XbDg&rview=1&output=text&as_brr=1&id=w4hptHSmqvMC&dq=subject%3A%22+Literature+%22&jtp=24.

  SO, I did a Ctrl-N for a new Window (or Ctrl-Tab in Firefox for a new TAB) and that brought up a window in which I could put in the URL (below) to be taken to Google's Translation page, which is at
    http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en.

    At Google's translation page, I put the full, long URL for the Italian book's "plain text" version of the page -- which gives us text from pages 20-24 -- into the "Translate a web page" feature at the bottom left of the Google translation page.
  Then I chose Italian to English below that input box and clicked on "Translate"...

  That brought me to Google's book again, this time displaying pages 20-24 in English.

    Here's an image of what I saw.

  Remember that this is an automated and usually somewhat-primitive web-translation, but it definitely gives you the gist of what is being said.

  When your mouse hovers for a bit over the translated text, Google shows you the original-language's text for that small area and asks if you'd like to contribute a better translation for it.  If you do, you click on that to put your suggestion into the pop-up input box.

  I then scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on "Continue" at the bottom right.

  This brought up pages 25-29 translated into English also, and it goes on like that throughout the rest of the book if you like.

  Really nice ! Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

Some recommended books, free or under $1

UPDATED 8/29/09 - Original posting 5/28/09.
Here are either free books or practically free ones that some might have missed while browsing the store but which are pretty useful for under a dollar (additions are above the earlier recommendations).

"FREE Weights and Measures Study Guide" by MobileReference and mobi (Kindle Edition - Jun 4, 2007)

An illustrated quick-study guide $0.01

"The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. (Kindle Edition - April 29, 2009)

A classic on college campuses and writing departments, the various editions of this have sold over 10 million copies. This edition includes an active table of contents. $.80

[Some MobileReference books are not showing as of 8/29/09. Probably temporary.] - They're back, 9/11/09.
"FREE Acupressure Guide For Relieving Hangovers," from MobileReference (Kindle Edition - Mar 21, 2008)

Well, a customer who's a voracious reader says it works. Hmmm. $0.01

"Les Misérables (Original version) by Victor Hugo (Kindle Edition - Aug 18, 2008)

English translation by Isabel F. Hapgood. This edition has a linked "Table of Contents" and is searchable and interlinked, formatted to work on the Kindle. $.80

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales of the Jazz Age" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Travis Scott Greer (Kindle Edition - Aug 18, 2008)

A collection of eleven short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it includes one of his better-known short stories (especially after the recent movie), "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." This edition has a linked "Table of Contents" and is searchable and interlinked, formatted to work on the Kindle. $0.80

[Some MobileReference books are not showing as of 8/29/09. Probably temporary.] - They're back, 9/11/09.
"FREE 25 Language Phrasebook: German, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, ... Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Thai. (Kindle Edition) by MobileReference (Author), mobi (Author)."

Well, not totally free. It's $.01 or one cent. I've no idea why the penny.

"The Cook's Illustrated How-to-Cook Library: An illustrated step-by-step guide to Foolproof Cooking (Kindle Edition) by The Editors of Cooks Illustrated (Editor)."

From a very popular series of books, this is a very large library, over 8 megs, and will take over a minute to download. From what I understand, this book might be free only temporarily. $0.00 [8/29/09 The book is no longer free and is now $9.99.]

"Complete Works of William Shakespeare" ~ 197 Plays, Poems & Sonnets ~ Active Table of Contents (Kindle Edition) by William Shakespeare (Author), The Wright Angles (Editor).

This edition is 82 cents, was published in April 2009, and has an Active Table of Contents."
Free books at Amazon:
1. Amazon's 7,000+ free books

2. Amazon's currently free non-classics Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!