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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."
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.
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
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.