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Amazon Hobbles Features For International Kindle
Barence writes "Amazon has stripped several key features out of the international edition of the Kindle, PC Pro has discovered. Newspapers and magazines are delivered without any photos, and the web browser has been disabled, presumably because Amazon doesn't want to foot the data bill. There's also a 40% premium on books bought via the Amazon store. 'International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US,' an Amazon spokesperson confessed."
That is Marketing Droid speak for
Lets screw everyone else.
I fail to understand the reasoning for this in places where Amazon already has a huge operation (eg UK)
Ah well, If they screw us up so much then people will find a way to get, sorry pirate or hack the US Editions and then watch Amazon cry fould as the whole thing is a mega flop just like the Zune is outside the US.(just an example)
When will the so called international companies really view the world as one big market and 'do the right thing'.
I certainly won't be buying one of these. I urge others to boycott them until the functionality is restored.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
OK what costs? Scanning/turning into an e-book? I'd bet that the vast majority of the offered titles are the same as they offer in the US, and processed/made in the US (or wherever it gets outsourced to) - so there's no extra cost there? Hosting could be an additional cost, Amazon do have a data centre in Dublin, London and Frankfurt, but bandwidth isn't that much more expensive here. Tax? Well perhaps, although books tend not to be taxed in the UK - who knows how ebooks will be treated though. Or it's the typical US move of take the dollar price and convert it to pounds or euros by changing the currency symbol.
Not to mention exchange rates and associated taxes in foreign countries, which vary from country to country.
Slow news day, I guess.
Nothing, as long as you use a web proxy in the US for downloading and don't expect the wireless to work on a different cell network.
What a moronic and ludicrous world IP law has created.
IP law didn't create the world you're describing, you did.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You would think that in certain territories they would come to an arrangement with a native provider.
Going with AT&T is strange. T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telefonica, Three all have large international networks and one of these would be a far more logical provider for Europe than AT&T.
Instead they're going to make the product worthless and expensive.
Put that way, nothing except the fact that it's likely to not be profitable. Given a US price P (always excluding sales tax) and a VAT of 15-25% depending on the EU country (applies to e-books in most of them; must typically be included in the price by law) you have to charge somewhere between 1.15*P and 1.25*P just to break even.
So 10% markup in the list price would be a loss. 20% would be about break-even, if we assume a 20% VAT. A 10% increase in what the seller gets would mean a 32% markup in the list price given that same 20% VAT.
They are using the wrong carrier. For my GPS trackers I'm using Jasper wireless services and the cost is less than AT&T in the US and the cards work globally.
I'm just wondering how long it will be before somebody writes up a little program that automates the process of using wikipedia to "launder" material from the broader internet through wikipedia for free Kindle access.
Since anybody can edit wikipedia, you could easily stash a URL on some obscure page. This program, running on a computer with a real ISP, would be watching for edits made by you, and would respond to them by retrieving the requested URL, reformatting it, and posting that as a subsequent edit. The wikipedia guys would presumably crack down if it occurred on a wide scale; but a few geek enthusiasts, particularly if they cleaned up the edits used after they were finished, could probably fly under the radar for a good while.
What on earth makes you think they can make an agreement w/ a euro cell carrier that is cheaper? Why on earth do you think they didn't try? I'll bet you don't even have a Kindle, don't want one, and just like to complain about evil corporations.
Qxe4