[Nathanael]

Kindle has hit China. A couple of weeks ago I happened across a Kindle 3 at Metro City, the major Shanghai electronics mall. As recently as a month ago the Kindle was still a no-show here in Shanghai; now every vendor booth has it.

I had some time today, so I stopped by to take a look. To paraphrase Henry Ford, the K3 is available here in any color you can imagine -- as long as you can only imagine black. It comes with the usual bevy of features --WiFi, 4GB memory, USB port. But to cut to the chase it had two features of note: the first, .azw support, was noticeable by its absence. But even more noticeable was the presence of epub support.

Yes, folks, you read that right: in Shanghai the Kindle does not do Kindle[*], but it does do epub. So I decided to test it: I whipped the SD card out of my Sibrary, grabbed a random epub and cabled it over to the K3 (ironically, it happened to be a copy of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which I had downloaded from Barnes & Noble; there was something serenely odd about watching the Kindle screen fade in to the BN logo). I lay my G5 down next to the K3 for comparison, and can attest that Washington Irving looked every bit as good on the Kindle as it does on my Sibrary.

(Interestingly, several customers looking over my shoulder as I was doing my test ultimately decided they liked my Sibrary better and wandered off in search of one for themselves.)

A more general observation: since buying my G5 at Metro City last year, I've noticed a sea change in the ereader market here. Six months ago nearly the only non-Chinese brand reader available was Sony. Today I saw almost all the usual suspects -- everything from Pandigital to Sony to the new iRiver Cover Story (wow! I want one of [those]!); the only conspicuously absent major player was the Nook.

The asking price of 1400-1500rmb was a bit steep compared to Stateside, but that's usual. IPads run about a third more in Shanghai than in the US. As to whether the Kindle is selling, one salesperson assured me it was selling well; another muttered the Chinese equivalent of "meh".

As to obtaining content, everyone assured me I could buy books wirelessly, but they were all a bit hedgy on how exactly it worked.

--Nathanael

[*]Well at least, that is, according to the salestaff and the manual in the box -- which listed a long line of formats from TXT, PDF and HTML to CHM, MOBI and EPUB, but not AZW. Since I don't own an AZW ebook, I couldn't test it.