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When I first registered an account a Kobo website, some of the section headers and a small number of banner elements were in Spanish and all the recommendations were for Spanish publications priced in Eurps. Curious, since at present, the site only supports English, German, French and Dutch as interface languages.
It would appear that GeoIP mechanism was picking up the fact that I was connecting from a Spanish IP address and customised the content accordingly.
I bought my first book over the weekend using my UK debit card. Since then, all the recommendations and interface elements have changed into English with the prices in GBP.
As for the symptoms being reported by previous posts, its possible that Kobo is working on a mechanism for their JP launch this week (19th). According to the information released during their press conference a few weeks back, Kobo in Canada will be handling Japanese market sales.
If they intend to use the current platform and domain for this service, its likely that their GeoIP will be configured to detect connections from Japanese IP addresses in order to present the content in an "appropriate" language. Furthermore, the country of issue of any debit/credit card associated with an account will also have an effect on what is presented to the user.
No doubt there are further considerations such as market segregation to consider. Without some refinement in the way this is implemented however, it may prevent users in certain regions from purchasing books in a particular language.
For me personally, I'd like to be able to buy books offered to the Japanese market using my UK debit card while connecting from Spain.
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