Kindles just went on sale at
Amazon.co.jp in Japan! With vertical text and everything, yay!
The lineup is limited to the Paperwhite, Fire, and 7” Fire HD. No vanilla Kindle, Kindle Keyboard, or 8.9” Fire HD (small is big in Japan). Also, there aren’t any special-offer editions.
- Paperwhite: JPY ¥8,480 (USD $105.60)
- Paperwhite 3G: ¥12,980 ($161.70)
- Fire: ¥12,800 ($159.40)
- Fire HD 7” 16GB: ¥15,800 ($196.80)
- Fire HD 7” 32GB: ¥19,800 ($246.60)
Unusually for Japan, the prices look very comparable to the “real” prices in the US, accounting for which prices sound good over here (for some reason 8’s are popular…) and currency fluctuations.
I ordered a PW after work, and the shipping date had already dropped back a couple of weeks from the initial-unit ship date.
Now the big question is whether Amazon Japan can convince the local publishers to actually release more than the trickle of ebooks that are currently available for the other e-readers like Sony and Rakuten’s Kobo.
The welcome letter on the top page from Jeff Bezos (one presumes he didn’t actually write it in Japanese…
) says they’ll sell 1.4 million books to start off with, of which only 50,000 are in Japanese. And 10,000 of those are free classics like Natsume Souseki and Miyazawa Kenji. So 40,000 “real” books total at the moment.
Questions that come to mind:
- Can the Japanese PW display its UI in English?
- The PW-J apparently has 2 fonts (vs 6 for the US version). Does that mean for English books too? That would kind of suck. My KK already has 3, so that'd actually be a step down. But the Sony PRS-T1 only has a single font, so it's at least better than that! (Japanese fonts are admittedly rather large to stuff into limited on-board memory.)
- How does the hardware differ from a non-Japanese PW, if at all? Like what about those fonts? Can a non-Japanese PW even display Japanese text? Vertically? Whether side-loaded or via personal docs or whatever? Has anyone tried this?
- Will our favorite muppet-alien be able to liberate the Japanese books like he does with books sold in English? If so, then Amazon Japan’s going to be making so much money off of me that it’s not even funny. I might as well just slit my wrists, one for dot-com and one for dot-jp…