Thread: Amazon expands language support in Kindle Store
View Single Post
Old 01-15-2010, 07:23 AM   #1
Nate the great
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Nate the great ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Nate the great's Avatar
 
Posts: 12,375
Karma: 23555235
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: DC Metro area
Device: Shake a stick plus 1
Amazon expands language support in Kindle Store
From the press release:
Quote:
SEATTLE, Jan 15, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that authors and publishers around the world can now use the self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers worldwide in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Now, authors and publishers outside the United States can take advantage of this same opportunity and start offering their books to Kindle customers at http://dtp.amazon.com.
********

It's great that Amazon is expanding the number of supported languages, but only until you realize that Amazon will never be able to support most of the languages in use; the Mobipocket format cannot display text in any direction other than left-to-right. Would you like to use Arabic? Sorry, that reads right to left. Japanese? Sorry, that's written vertically.

And the Kindle has less than complete support for Unicode (which is rather odd, because no other device based on the Mobipocket format has that problem). So if you want to display a language in anything other than Latin based characters (Western European languages, basically), you're out of luck.
Nate the great is offline   Reply With Quote