Amazon announced earlier this week that the Kindle would finally be available for international orders, and with Wispernet included. That's right, for $279 you can now purchase a Kindle for use outside of the US.
International licensing right: a nightmare.
Remember when Amazon had to pull 1984 from the Kindles of everyone that purchased the book? That was because whoever sold them the rights to publish the book on the Kindle didn't have them in the first place. This shows how difficult it is for a company to manage copyrights when you have to "publish" a book to a new format like the Kindle. Now when you go to the international market these problems are multiplied: not only is there the possibility that the rights to a single book are owned by different publishers in different countries, but the copyright "rules" may also be different. That means that for each single book Amazon may have had to sign several contract with different publishers and on different terms.
Dealing with mobile providers
Filling the Kindle virtual library with books is only half of the problem, the other half is delivering them. This means that Amazon needs to have a "roaming" contract with a sufficient number of international network providers to make the whispernet financially viable. Don't forget that in some countries mobile bandwidth is much more expensive than in the US. negotiating something like whispernet in places where mobile bandwidth is billed above $1 per megabyte must have been a real challenge! To be honest, some "network heavy" features like the blogs will not be available to international users, and I suspect it is for that reason: the mobile bandwidth cost would make this too expensive in some countries.
Still, when looking at all the challenges that Amazon had to overcome to bring the Kindle to the international market you have to admire them for pulling it off.
2 Responses to "Why the international Kindle is an achievement.":
I think fixing the second challenge must have made the first avoidable for Amazon.
As far as I can see, when you buy a book on your International Kindle, you are buying it from the US Amazon site, via a US network, via a GSM device, that just happens to be currently roaming in, say, Europe.
Hence, from a rights point of view, the sale is exactly the same as a US Kindle buying a book.
By treating the machine as if it was a native of the US, the rights issue (already solved for previous Kindles) is not a problem.
Not international enough though.
Amazon (Joyo in China) don't have Chinese Kindle books. And Kindle doesn't support Chinese characters without hacks yet. With censorship on print books, China is already the biggest market for eBooks (no copyright though).
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