Kindle ships internationally to around 170 countries since October 2009. This fact has an essential influence on how local ebook markets develop.
How ebookstores in a medium-sized country like Poland or Sweden can benefit from Kindle’s presence? Below you’ll find two examples.
The key opportunity is the lack of foreign-language content for Kindle. Obviously this is not the problem in English-speaking or Spanish-speaking countries. But if you speak a different language, you buy a Kindle, check the Kindle Store, and realize there are no books in your mother tongue.
Amazon is satisfied with the sales of English Kindle ebooks globally, but to me, selling Kindle in the non-English countries is like selling paper, not books.
Kindle is for many users a symbol of e-reading. It’s also on many markets the most affordable e-reading device, even with shipping costs and import duties.
There are between 100,000 and 200,000 Kindle owners in Poland. Last autumn, Kindle was the most promoted Christmas gift in our country. Novelty factor, affordable price, and a pretty much advanced ebook market made it a perfect gift.
Since 2009 local Polish ebookstores adjusted to the situation, leveraging the fact that the top-of-mind device is the Kindle.
If you want to approach Kindle owners in your country, consider these ideas:
Sell ebooks in mobi format
This sounds crazy at the beginning, but it’s easier to accomplish than you might think.
Most ebookstores around the world offer books in epub, usually with Adobe DRM. But publishers are more and more open to DRM-free solutions, and ebookstores are pushing for this.
Once you can sell ebooks with no DRM, you can also sell them in mobi format. Ebookstores usually offer a conversion, so instead or making an epub file, they make epub and mobi.
When the ebookstore adds mobi, it can sell directly to Kindle owners. Major Polish ebookstores, Virtualo and Nexto among them, offer mobi as one of available formats. On Virtualo there are over 22,000 epub ebooks, and over 13,000 books in mobi format.
What’s more, ebookstores offer a simple feature that let’s users automate sending books to Kindle. Thanks to that, every time a mobi file is bought, it is automatically added to user’s Kindle.
This is based on a feature offered by Amazon. Users can add their own books by sending mobi files to email addresses associated with their Kindle devices and/or applications. You need no extra permission or a special technology for that.
Offer the store adjusted to Kindle browser
This idea is showing how creative you can be to associate your ebookstore with Kindle.
Woblink, launched by a group of Polish publishers, offers a version of their ebookstore, which is optimized for the screen of the Kindle.
You can browse for books on Woblink directly in a Kindle browser (see picture on top right). The store has to fit 800×600 screen, and has to be extremely light. What you achieve is the comfort of buying books without leaving the Kindle.
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These two examples show, that in the non-English markets, where there is a huge gap between availability of the Kindle, and availability of the content for Kindle, local ebookstores play Amazon’s cards already.
Non-English ebook markets have to grow, with or without the Kindle Store.
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