Amazon have arrange for international wireless access in an expensive way. But the advantage is that it was very quick to roll out.
In the US they have a bulk arrangement with AT&T for the data from their servers to the Kindles in the US. This is cheap.
Internationally, they've taken advantage of AT&T's roaming agreements that are already in place with lots of other telecoms companies around the world. Unfortunately, international roaming data rates are very high. Thus the $1.99 charge for Americans downloading abroad, and the built-in fee for International users.
If they had set up their own servers in other countries, and had made arrangements with each local telecom company, within each country it would have been possible for Amazon to absorb the cost.
But they wouldn't have been able to roll out to so many countries so quickly - just look at how few country-specific Amazon web sites there are, compared to how many countries can use the International Kindle.
So I think they did the right thing to use high-cost data roaming agreements for the international Kindle. But I think they're wrong to hide the cost from international consumers by raising the base price of every book.
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Originally Posted by fugazied
I don't really understand the extra fee, is it a kickback for publisher? Some kind of carrot to entice publishers to allow international sales despite piracy/licensing misgivings?
It was one of the disappointments for my international friends who ordered one.
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