[BRIEF NOTE] No Kindle in Canada

[rfmcdonald]

Charlie Stross has already blogged his concern about the Amazon Kindle, the online bookselling empire's "software and hardware platform developed [. . .] for reading e-books and other digital media."

As I've said in the past, the price structure of the commercial ebook market is broken — for a variety of tedious reasons, publishers try to sell ebooks for not less than 80% of the price of the cheapest dead tree edition currently in print. (And then for different but equally tedious reasons they expect us to accept DRM on top.) This is a deeply annoying situation and it has stunted the growth of the ebook sector for a decade or more. Today, even a top-selling ebook edition is lucky to make 10% of the sales volume of a mass market paperback edition of the same book.

When Amazon came along, with the Kindle, a device to which my first reaction was highly unfavourable. My initial fears have been borne out; while Amazon fixed the Kindle's aesthetic problems efficiently, their behaviour towards customers has not been good — as witness the 1984 scandal. Mind you, that pales into insignificance compared to their behaviour towards authors: the gay deranking scandal may have been hastily denounced as an accident, but it shows that they've created a frighteningly efficient machine for imposing ideological censorship, should they choose to do so. What's even worse is that they seem to be close to achieving iPod status in the field of ebook readers. The dangers of a monopsony arising in ebook distribution can't be overemphasized, and should be obvious.

Stross' analysis gets grimmer from here.

In Canada, at least, we can consider ourselves safe for the moment because we don't have the Kindle on sale for Canada yet.

While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.

Canada is notorious for being tardy to the technological party, for a variety of reasons ranging from convoluted broadcast contracts to patent issues to domestic business practices. Probably the most notorious example of this involves Apple's lustfully coveted products: we were a year late for the iPhone and the iTunes Music Store, Skype was available on the iPhone in every country except ours (until last month), and we still can't buy high-definition movies on iTunes. As for television, it's taken decades of negotiation to finally get HBO and Nickelodeon channels in Canada, although the "Canadianized" versions are merely brand licences and don't always include identical content to their American counterparts.

[. . .]

For now, Amazon is remaining mum on why Canada has been shut out of the international launch. A message on Amazon's Kindle page states, "We are currently unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle content in Canada. We are working to make Kindle available to our Canadian customers as soon as possible."

The delay could be due to publishing contracts, although that seems unlikely since e-books are already available domestically. Because the Kindle uses GSM networks to download its product internationally, Amazon could also still be in negotiations with Rogers. It's not necessarily a matter of retail inventory either, since Kindles aren't destined for the Best Buys of the world (international customers have to order directly from Amazon and have the e-readers shipped from the United States).

Yay?