Kindle devices are available in over 170 countries, but it doesn’t mean users from those countries can easily find publications in their own language. Only Germany is in a good situation, where Kindle Store was launched this spring. Two new stores, localized in Italy and Spain, are on the way.
But how to find non-English titles at the biggest Kindle Store, available at the main site, Amazon.com, from where most users buy Kindle devices? There are a couple of ways to do it. However, as Amazon is not providing an option to search by language, we have to use some tricks to do that.
Search Kindle Store by phrase
We will be using Dutch as an example language. Replace it with your preferred language – spelled in English (f.e. Portuguese, Italian, Finnish).
Go directly to this link: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks. Thanks to that the search will return only titles from Kindle Store. This is important as we will be looking for phrases which may be also found in other sections of Amazon site.
There are a couple of phrases you can try, but the most reliable is the one combining the language with the word Edition. It’s how non-English books are usually described at the title level.
"Dutch Edition"
Important: type it with quotation marks. The search will return only exact matches. From our experience it’s by far the most accurate way to find non-English books. Below you’ll find links to search queries for the most popular languages – together with a number of results.
“German Edition” – 32,408 results
“Spanish Edition” – 11,199 results
“French Edition” – 5,168 results
“Portuguese Edition” – 2,910 results
“Italian Edition” – 2,784 results
For other languages the number of results is less than 100. You can always broaden the search by removing quotation marks. Another way is to use a list of suggestions when you type a phrase in a search box (see picture below).
Search Amazon by a product tag
Another tip to find a book in your language is to search Amazon with product tags. Any product on Amazon can be tagged by the users. This is also applying to Kindle ebooks.
Go to a special Amazon page called Most Popular Tags. You can search here products by their tags. Suggested tags to use: Dutch, Dutch language, Dutch book, Dutch ebook.
Search Amazon by Listmania lists
Listmania lists are created by Amazon users. You can also give them a try and check whether there are any lists collecting ebooks in a specific language.
Go to a special Listmania search page and try phrases as suggested for product tags.
Search Amazon via Google Web Search
Google is famous for returning lots of results, so you can be sure you won’t miss any title if you use this method. Go to Google web search and in a search box type:
intitle:kindle site:amazon.com "Dutch Edition"
A phrase intitle:kindle is used to narrow search at Amazon.com site to items containing the word “kindle” in their titles. As you know any Kindle book is described with [Kindle Edition].
You can try Google if the list of the titles at Kindle Store is too short. For the search query “Dutch Edition”, Google returns approximately 12,900 results, comparing to 40 when using Kindle Store’s own search.
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Currently at Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing, there are 6 languages supported: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. However since January 2010 there were a dozen of other languages available: Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Irish, Icelandic, Estonian, Swahili, Afrikaans, Albanian, Indonesian and Latin.
This may be an indication about how many books you may find in your language. You can expect more books if they’re in one of supported languages.
We’re aware that this is not an easy thing to find non-English titles at Kindle Store. Soon we will publish a post with other sources of non-English Kindle books, so stay tuned and subscribe for free to RSS feed of our Tips & More section.
