Kindle Frustration

As an early adopter, I was delighted when I heard that Kindle has a launch date for the UK – October 17, 2009.

As a husband of a top author (check out www.theharcombediet.com), I was equally excited about the prospect of being able to help her find an additional route-to-market for her writing skills.

So with massive enthusiasm I jumped in to order my Kindle and get to work on Zoe’s Kindle books.

Now the reality:

Kindle will be available worldwide as of 17.10.09 but it can only be purchased from Amazon.com (in the USA).  The price tag of $279 makes it ok value but when you get to the cart, you get charged $20.98 shipping and $45 import tax. Total price $344.98. mmm strange that wasn’t mentioned in any press release.

Ok, so hardware sorted, how about the publishing side? An early claim from Kindle was that it will change the world of publishing, making it easier for authors to get their works published without needing to find a publisher (echos of itunes here…).  So after reading all the technical requirements for publishing, which seemed relatively simple if you can manage some basic html, I set off to publish.

Unfortunately, what Amazon don’t tell you is that to have an author account to publish to Kindle you must have a US dollar bank account, a US social security number and a US postal address. Basically, you need to be an American living in America.

So, Kindle is available to the world, you can download any of their 250,000 titles in under 60 seconds each, anywhere on mother earth. Great, as long as you want to read American literature.

Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon)  states their vision for Kindle is  “…to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds”

Jeff, if you’re reading this; please, please, please sort out the Author accounts so that authors worldwide can start to add their works. You’ve managed it for Createspace (Amazon’s self-publish service)  when will the same be available for Kindle?