Amazon takes Kindle to the UK
Opens Kindle store
Amazon UK's front page is dominated today by a letter to its customers, introducing the "third generation of Kindles".
In other words, Brits can buy Kindle e-Readers direct from Amazon UK, instead of the American mothership. That means UK prices - £149 for the 3G-Wi-Fi version and £109 for the Wi-Fi only version.
This is comfortably pitched below the cheapest iPad, Apple's enormously successful media consumption device, and at expensive Christmas gift territory.
Also We suspect many iPad owners will buy Kindles too - in our opinion books are easier to read on the Amazon device.
Let's not forget the new UK Kindle store with 400,000 books and magazines. Amazon's vision is to "have every book ever written, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds". Just like Google, then.
You can place your order for both Kindles now, for dispatch on August 27.
COMMENTS
So out of interest
How do you intend to transfer your existing books over to a Kindle?
The one thing that has plagued ereading devices are all the proprietary formats, DRM and tie-ins to single stores. And Kindle is one of the worst examples. At least Sony devices let you buy books from a variety of places and support a vendor / device agnostic DRM.
get your stinking hands off...
...they're mine, all mine i tells ya!
seriously, look away
thats me going through your pockets checking you haven't got my precious by mitsake
FYI
You can use the iPad in direct sunlight fine. You just need to turn the screen brightness right up.
AZW is a crap format
It's based on the venerable MOBI format and lacks many of the features that the more modern ePub format offers. It's really just HTML with limited CSS support. Amazon don't seem to be investing in improving it either.
It's shocking that Amazon are releasing a device that does not support the ePub format.
If you do buy a Kindle you should definitely checkout Calibre. It does a pretty good job of converting just about any format to any other. It does clever stuff like convert ePub SVG graphics into JPEG that the Kindle can render.
Better off with iPad?
Since the iPad costs 4x as much as a Kindle, it should be nicer. And it should be able do more.
But you could buy a good laptop for the same price as an iPad and do *even more* with it!
So really, the comparison isn't fair. Try comparing a Kindle to a cheap Chinese Android tablet.
