Apparently Vodafone NZ is in “deep discussion” with Amazon about carrying the Kindle in New Zealand. The last time someone said “deep discussion” was Telecom talking about bringing the iPhone to their XT network. We all know how well that went.
*for certain definitions of “Worldwide”.
Amazon just put out a press release, with the great news that their acclaimed electronic book reader – the Kindle – is now available “around the world”. Wonderful news!
But wait. If you go to this page, and click on the handy link titled “Click here to see important information specific to your country”, things start to get a little funky. Let’s run through a few countries to check availability:
- Australia? Yep.
- France? Oui!
- Fiji? Io. Bula!
- Mongolia? Ummmm, yes.
- Guinea-Bissau? Sim!
- New Zealand? Yeah nah. Sorry.
What the heck is going on here? Either there is a serious omission by Amazon, or some nameless publication rights holder has put a spanner in the works. Unfortunately my money is on the latter. Perhaps Brian Edwards has got in someone’s ear?
Stay tuned while I attempt to get to the bottom of this.
Update: Here’s a thought: the Kindle requires a 3G data connection, and Amazon likes the data to be free to users. New Zealand carriers are rather expensive when it comes to mobile data. Perhaps Amazon couldn’t reach an agreement with a local carrier?
Update 2: Ok that’s not it. Fiji gets the Kindle with no mobile partner, requiring a USB connection to a PC to update ebooks. Secondly, Simon Lieschke has quite helpfully scraped the country availability data from Amazon into one long list.
Amazon Kindle Available Worldwide*
Popularity: unranked [?]
