Despite rumors that the Kindle would reach the U.K. this year, the Guardian quotes an Amazon spokesman there as denying such plans.
In fact, the intro isn’t supposed to happen anywhere outside the States.
Word games?
Hmm. Any technicalities here, assuming that the Guardian report is right—which it might not be? Er, could we see the UKindle rather than the Kindle? Or at least the Kindle II? The Kindle’s wireless is U.S.-linked, so that could be an excuse to rename the K-machine for the Brits and others.
Oh, well, for the developing world at least, there’s also the OLPC machine, left in the photo—whose screen I personally find more readable for the e-books than the Kindle because of more contrast between the text and the background. A better version of the organization’s XO-1 laptop for e-books will appear in the future. More immediately, scads of mini laptops are on the way that will be general purpose machines but also serve as acceptable e-readers. And how about cellphones—which many younger people with good eyes prefer to tablet-style readers, since you can slip ’em into your pocket?
iPhone better traveled–and on the cusp of getting Mobi e-bookware
Meanwhile the iPhone is headed for Japan. Now suppose that Apple gets serious about e-books for The Phone, the way certain third party developers are. It’ll hardly kill the Kindle but eat up some market share in the States and beyond. More than 50 countries, reports Computerworld, are to get iPhones by the end of 2008. Quite a contrast to Amazon’s U.S.-fixated strategy, eh? Interestingly, however, Amazon could benefit from the iPhone in another way. Isn’t Mobipocket, also from Amazon, supposed to be running on the iPhone shortly?
Thanks to MobileRead for the Guardian pointer and to Merfilin for the Japanese news. We also appreciated the MR’s gang’s kind efforts to let people know of the TeleBlog’s service interruption, the result of a fire at a Houston data center run by the Planet.
Image: CC-licensed photo from curiouslee, aka Mike Lee, one of the diligent organizers of the OLPC Learning Club, based in the Washington, D.C. area.
David;
I think Amazon is probably trying to work out some behind the scenes tech issues for the Kindle UK.
I can’t see them wanting to support two different products running on two different cellular carrier systems.
Either they’ll get it worked out or they’ll wait until the Kindle II with perhaps a GSM carrier for world-wide compatibility.
Sony, which has even fewer tech issues to resolve since they don’t have to contend with wireless connectivity, still hasn’t gotten around to the Sony Reader UK.
I doubt either company wants to intentionally leave that much money on the table so there must be something keeping it from happening.
Aaron: I hope our friends at the Bookseller in the U.K. are reading this. They may have further thoughts. Thanks for yours. David