Amazon unzips its digital-only Brazilian, waves Kindles at Canada

I've just checked it out

There is only one model of kindle advertised, one of the simplest ones, I think. It doesn't have touch or a keyboard or a backlight. It's the 6 in e-ink e-book reader.

No mention of 3g, so I guess it's wifi only.

It's selling for about US$140. So it's about twice as expensive as it is in the US, which is pretty much the normal mark up we have to pay due to import taxes, duties, etc. etc.

I don't know about the book selection, sadly I've been out of the market of reading for pleasure for a few years, but there are no engineering books, which probably isn't their fault, most probably the publishers don't see a market.

You can buy e-books in other languages, probably amazon is making available everything they can from around the world that is not subject to regional controls. This is very good, the prices are very good compared to printed books, most of which you wouldn't be able to find anyway. I typed Nel Gaiman, just to see what would come up, and there were thirty *pages* of stuff.

It's claiming that the top selling book at the moment is Fifty Shades os Gray, so it seems that ipad wielding moms are the main market right now.

The second one is another Fifty shades of bullshit.

The third one is a hagiography of the founder of one of the largest evangelical churches in Brazil

The fourth is a self help diet book.

The fifth is a George Martin book.

Interesting variation!

It'll be interesting to see how this holds up against the e-shops of the other large brazilian bookseller chains, Cultura, Saraiva and Siciliano, which also sell e-books (and real books, and other physical stuff like the american amazon store.)

Kindles already widely available in Canada

I'm not sure why this is fresh news. Kindles have been sold in the ubiquitous Staples office supply store chain in Canada for a couple of years, and Amazon.com ships Kindles to Canada as well. Amazon.ca has been operating a Canadian e-book store for even longer. Perhaps they're just announcing that from now on Kindles will be ordered through and shipped from the .ca site instead of the .com site? (Amazon supports the Kindle whispernet cellular network option in Canada in case you were wondering.)

However, Kobo remains much more popular in Canada than Kindle because their e-readers are offered in many more stores at more competitive prices, and national bookseller Chapters.ca partners with Kobo to offer an e-book store with better selection and often better prices than Amazon.