Quote:
Originally Posted by theonna
Of course, there are about billion Chinese, another billion of Indians, half a billion of Russians, but who cares about them, not significant market, right?
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Hmmm.... Kobo has already added Japanese.
As for adding Chinese? Looking at some of the Chinese companies manufacturing ebook readers for the Chinese market suggests that they are being squeezed out by cheap tablets and handheld devices. When I last looked, quite a few of them had gone out of the ereader business. It will be interesting to see how Amazon does selling the Kindle in China though it does have an advantage in owning its proprietary ebook format.
With the news that Amazon has cut their orders for eInk screens to around 20,000 per month which has been referred to as enough to repair existing Kindles but not supply any new ones unless Amazon is planning on using another technology. Add in the news that Liquavista has been bought from Samsung by Amazon, it would appear that Amazon is not going to be making eInk Kindles for a good chunk of 2013 and the next Kindle ereader will have a Liquavista colour screen.
You can already read Cyrillic with the correct font -- however the population of Russia is below 145 million not 500 million. Given that the Kobo firmware is based on Linux, adding a Cyrillic keyboard is doable if Kobo thought the market was worthwhile.
As for India? Population is 1.27 billion but how many languages are used? 30 languages with over a million speakers? Hindi with Devanagari script may be the official language with about 400 million speakers but that still leaves a lot of people who are not happy with having Hindi stuffed down their throats. I seem to remember being referred to as a behanchod for suggesting that India should go the way of China and standardize on a single language. One of the few Punjabi words I know. Most of the rest are even less polite.
Regards,
David