Amazon Takes Kindle Global, Lowers Price

Amazon plans to start selling its Kindle reader in over 100 countries and territories on Oct. 19, and the company has already started booking pre-orders for the device on its web site.

By John Ribeiro
Wed, October 07, 2009

IDG News Service — Amazon plans to start selling its Kindle reader in over 100 countries and territories on Oct. 19, and the company has already started booking pre-orders for the device on its web site.

Amazon is selling the Kindle with U.S. & International Wireless to customers in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and South America, for US$279 for a reader with a 6-inch display and the ability to wirelessly download books and other content globally, the company said on Wednesday.

The Kindle was earlier only available in the U.S. Amazon has been working with publishers for many months to build a vast selection of English language books available around the world, said Stephanie Mantello Ward, a spokeswoman for Amazon, in an e-mail on Wednesday.

Amazon also has some books in languages other than English, but its focus right now is to provide its customers with the best possible experience for English-language content, she added.

The Kindle will not be sold in China because Amazon is unable to ship the Kindle or offer Kindle content to Chinese customers, the company said.

“We want to ship Kindle everywhere, and we're working on it,” Ward said. She did not give a reason why China was not included in the current launch.

Best-seller books will cost $11.99 or more for international customers, with about 100,000 other titles available for less than $5.99, Amazon said. These prices are higher than in the U.S. where most best sellers cost $9.99.

As Amazon is selling from the U.S. store, the prices of the books in international markets are denominated in U.S. dollars rather than local currencies. “We aren't announcing a timeline today for payments in other currencies,” Ward said.

Amazon also said that it is lowering the price of the 6-inch display Kindle in the U.S. from $299 to $259. The Kindle DX, which has a 9.7-inch display, retails for $489.

The Kindle with U.S. & International Wireless is 0.36 inches thick and weighs just over 10 ounces, Amazon said. Its 2GB of memory holds up to 1,500 books. The device features an experimental text-to-speech feature, Amazon added.

Customers who buy a Kindle in a country without Whispernet coverage will be able to purchase content from the Kindle Store through a PC and download it to their Kindle through a USB (universal serial bus) cable, Ward said.

Whispernet is a wireless delivery system for the Kindle that allows a user to download books and other Kindle content. AT&T will be offering the service to international users of the Kindle.

You are here: Technology Topics » Operating Systems » News

Most Recent Operating Systems Stories

White Papers »

Watson - A System Designed for Answers. The future of workload optimized systems design

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and DeepQA technology. Read the white paper about Watson's workload optimized system design.

It's A Bold Statement from IBM: "the one system that will unite all the others."

With 1.5 billion instructions in one second (BIPS), while consuming less energy than ever before, Wintergreen Research says IT departments need to sit up and take notice of this hybrid system that combines the System z with servers.

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter