Fellow Vancouverite Ian Bell has a short post on the reasons behind the omission of Canada from Amazon.com recent expansion of the Kindle into over 100 countries. The short version? The lack of telecommunications competition in Canada:
No, the politics involved in preventing the Kindle from reaching the grubby hands of Canadian consumers is probably the same old culprits we always pick on around here: Canada’s wireless carriers. This article reveals a bit of a crack in the story. While the Domestic US Kindle is using the Sprint EVDO network, Amazon is not working with local wireless partners in each individual country for the International version… the company has done a single deal with AT&T Global Networks, which in turn has gone out and negotiated low-cost data roaming agreements with carrier partners all over the world.
To add insult to injury, Bezos joked about countries missing out on the international release in the original Reuters release:
“There is a big demand for English language books all over the world,” said Bezos, adding that it would be available in every continent except Antarctica.
“We apologize for that omission. We’ll work on that.”
Amazon has been quick to offer that it is working on a Canadian version, but has not yet specified when Canucks might see such a device.
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