Tired of flipping the pages of the latest book you are reading? Would you rather read it on a light, friendly electronic device which can store hundreds of books? Up until now the Amazon Kindle eBook reader has only been available in the USA, but now Amazon have announced that it will be available in over 100 countries worldwide and will include free 3G connectivity so you can download books from the Amazon Kindle Store on the go.
The not so neatly named ‘Kindle U.S. & International Wireless’ can be ordered now for just $279 (which is about £175) from the American Amazon website and will ship internationally to over 100 countries (of course including the UK) from October 19th. It is likely that buyers will need to pay an import tax (as it costs more than £145) which will probably push the price to around £200.
Included in each international version of the Kindle is a 3G sim card that lets you download books right to your Kindle; no annual contracts, no monthly fees, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots. However some astute readers have noticed that the small print for the 3G roaming does mention that “when traveling abroad, you can download books wirelessly from the Kindle Store or your Archived Items for a fee of $1.99.” Here, being abroad means not in the USA, so UK customers will need to pay the extra £1.25 per book.
“We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds.”
The Kindle is less than 1 cm think and weighs just 284 grams . It comes with 2GB of memory allowing up to 1500 books to be stored internally. To get books users pay for and download them at the Kindle Store which contains over 250,000 books and includes UK newspapers such as The Times and The Telegraph.
Amazon has future plans to release a UK specific version of the Kindle enabling UK owners to purchase the Kindle and Kindle books in sterling from our Amazon.co.uk site.
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Tags: 3G, Amazon, ebook reader, Kindle, Tech, Technology
I for one am looking forward to this, but am apprehensive about the costs involved – being the UK I foresee us being held hostage to the costs of it running on a 3G network and the “tariff” for this.
Let’s hope that the networks don’t see this as another opportunity for daylight robbery.
Roll on the 19th I say.
Very very interesting post..I like this one. gotta bookmark this one.