Quote:
Originally Posted by boxcorner
Amazon is already selling e-readers in Germany and France:
What do you mean by manipulation? |
Oddly enough, when I click on your amazon.fr link, I get a list of Sony readers available for sale through Amazon vendors. If you want to buy a Kindle here in France, you have to go to the US Amazon site to do so (though they were featuring the Kindle on the front page of the French site for a while).
As someone else mentioned, the big issue is content. I've heard American Kindle customers moan about the lack of French or German titles from Amazon. French ebooks are now available primarily through FNAC, Darty and possibly a few other locations - though the publishers are sticking to their p-book pricing and privileges - and primarily in epub editions. And in checking out the availability of titles for Kindle over here, you run into geographical restrictions, additional costs (mostly VAT related) and the lack of access to the UK Kindle site for those of us "on the Continent."
OK, the Agency Model really screwed things up for us anglophones living in Europe and looking for ready access to English language reading material - but one huge advantage of the Sony reader is that the geographical orientation of the device is fairly easily overcome. Obviously, that's not exactly a feature Sony can aggressively market, but for me, at least, it's significant.
Had Amazon opened its UK based Kindle store to the rest of Europe when WH Smith and Waterstones were closing theirs off to us, I probably would be regretting my Sony purchase. But add me to the list of those who don't want wireless capability for my reader. I hardly need the temptation to impulse buy books, plus, without having to connect my reader to the computer now and then, I know I would completely forget to charge it (as happens regularly with my mobile phone).
Sony doesn't really market many of its standard electronic products - at least not over here. They still seem to sell well enough that folks (over here at least) are buying them.