From the press release:
Amazon.es today launched the Spanish Kindle Store offering customers a vast selection of over 22,000 Spanish-language Kindle books, including the most best sellers in Spain with 20 of the Top 30 El Cultural fiction and non-fiction best sellers, the largest selection of Catalan, Basque and Galician books–and over a thousand free classics in Spanish. The new store offers customers over 900,000 titles – including thousands of global best sellers – in English and other languages. Amazon also announced the new Kindle–the smallest, lightest and most affordable Kindle ever–is now available on Amazon.es for only 99EUR . Amazon.es customers can order the first Spanish-language Kindle today on www.amazon.es/kindle.
“We are excited to introduce the new Spanish Kindle Store which features the most best sellers in Spain, the leading selection of titles in Catalan, Basque and Galician and also includes unique and exclusive titles from Rosa Montero,” said Gordon Willoughby, Director, EU Kindle. “Kindle is already the best-selling e-reader in the world. It comes with an electronic ink display that reads like real paper, with no glare, even in bright daylight and it offers the convenience of downloading books in less than 60 seconds. Kindle is so small and light that it disappears in your hands, which is just what you want when you are reading a great story like ‘El puente de los asesinos,’ by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.”
The Spanish Kindle Store’s vast selection of content in a wide range of categories includes popular titles from best-selling authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Navarro and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, as well as short form content from El País and La Vanguardia, uniquely available on Kindle. In addition, the store will launch with three exclusive self-published books from award-winning author and journalist Rosa Montero, using Kindle Direct Publishing. From today, independent authors and publishers can use Kindle Direct Publishing to make their books available in Amazon.es’s Kindle Store. (For more information on Kindle Direct Publishing, see today’s announcement atwww.amazon.com/pr/kindle.)
From the Direct Publishing press release:
Amazon.es today announced that authors and publishers are now able to make their books available in the Amazon.es Kindle Store (www.amazon.es/kindle) using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) (http://kdp.amazon.es). Authors and publishers can utilize the new Spanish-language KDP website to make their books available in Spain and more than 100 countries worldwide, while continuing to own the rights to their books. The popular 70% royalty option, which allows independent authors and publishers worldwide to make more money on books sold to Kindle customers in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Austria, France and Italy, is now also available for books sold in Spain.
I can’t help but believe that it’d be better to create multi-lingual Kindles giving users the ability to shop and read in several languages as well as display menus in the language of their choice. This offer only complicates matters for people who understand both English and Spanish.
Of course, I realize that creating these sorts of Kindles along with a book ecosystem to service takes time. I just hope Amazon is working this.
@Michael
i believe, the fourth generation Kindle (the $79) has the ability to switch the menu’s to the other languages. You can make the changes from the settings menu.