[xendula]

Numerous blogs are reporting that a Kindle store is now live at Amazon.ca.*Before we all get too excited, I should clarify that this looks to be e-books only. While apps for various platforms are listed, there are no hardware Kindles on offer, and when I went looking for them on the main Amazon.ca page, I was redirected to the American mothership.

But there are some welcome content offerings this new store brings to Canada: We can access the Kindle Singles now, and there is a reasonably large and well-organized selection of French e-books, which some of us have long been coveting. And, like the Canadian Kobo store, they are highlighting local authors. I’m not sure a legend like Alice Munro needs the front-page push necessarily, but it’s a start. And a ‘Canadian Bestsellers’ feature spotlights authors such as Rawi Hage and Tanis Rideout who are well worth a read.

I have some questions on how this is all going to work, exactly. If you need a .com account to buy a hardware Kindle, are you going to want to register separately for a .ca account too? And will features such as Wish List and Recommendations, which depend on your purchase history, carry over? My suspicion is they will not.

So, as someone who is already using the main Amazon.com store and who has an established library there, I am not seeing the incentive for me to switch over to the new Canadian version. I just hope they don’t make me do it—or that if they do, they have a protocol in place to transfer my stuff.

Via Teleread