Where In The World?

When it comes to looking at new offers we always like to check out the deal – doesn’t everybody?

So looking at the new 'Kindle for the PC', caught our eye today and we had to look past the glossy colour pictures as these were obviously positioned for those who read their books in black and white greyscale.

First we were keen to see how many titles were available:

US 372852
UK 296019
Africa 196166
Asia 304938
Australia 289163
Canada Nil
Europe 302511
India 293319
Latin America and Caribbean 308759
Middle East 301723

It was also interesting that the standard page threw up ‘The Christmas Bus’ and a romance with a very provocative cover ‘Bound for the Holidays (Ties That Bind book 1) under the Middle East selection! All the prices were in US dollars. So although the system could deal with the complexity of territorial rights and territorial pricing it only knew dollars.

We then looked at the newspapers and got really confused. The US pricing for UK newspapers was listed at $9.99, yet the UK pricing for the same digital file was $22.99. Obviously it costs a lot to ship the file back top the UK! We immediately thought the same would apply to magazines, but this was not the case and prices were comparable.









So what does this little exercise tell us?

Well the international offer is clearly at variance to the US and that their territorial regions are somewhat ambiguous. We still feel this is a real winner in the long term, so we are only critical of the pricing and territorial differences today. However, if Amazon with all its book knowledge perform so, what do we expect with regards other new entrants who know little and some may say care less about such sensitive issues?