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International Kindle might be an expat's dream. For English speaking expats, getting books abroad has always been costly and difficult. Traditionally we've had 3 options, buy English books from local stores, order online, or buy from used bookstores locally.
• Local stores are frustrating as the selection is very small and the prices are not fair currency conversions, meaning the book has $10 printed as the price but the cost you pay in locally currency is double that amount. Selection is always awful as well and they tend to only carry a few popular fiction titles - let's see Harry Potter, Harry Potter and Harry Potter, *sigh*
• Ordering online is ok, but shipping can be expensive. I once paid a ridiculous $35 shipping for a textbook I needed. Since Amazon Japan and Amazon are essentially the same company you can usually get free shipping in Japan but I imagine elsewhere in the world you wouldn't be so lucky.
• Used English bookstores are not a great deal either. I find it almost criminal how they give you only about $2 store credit (or $1 cash) for a book they will then sell for $10. Not to mention they refuse to buy books with small defects, yet the entire store is filled with cigarette smelling, silverfish infested books - I'm sure expats in the more tropical humid regions feel my pain on this one.
But the International Kindle may offer a way to get a large selection of books at low prices overseas without dealing with the usual pains. I have steered away from Kindle because of DRM but I may have to live with it and hope they remove DRM sometime in the future (and just maybe a firmware update for native pdf and unicode character support).
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