Amazon Launches Kindle Store In Australia

Book2BookWednesday 13 Nov 2013

There's been no announcement from Amazon, but the Australian Kindle Store is now live and it is selling ebooks. It currently lists 2.1 million titles in stock as well as the Kindle Paperwhite, basic Kindle,and the Kindle Fire HD and HDX. Prices start at $109 AUD.


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And  from Shelf Awareness
Amazon: Oz Kindle Store, U.K. Sunday Delivery, 'Post Office Prime'

Amazon has launched the Australian Kindle Store, offering more than two million e-books. In addition, the company's Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HDX tablets are available online as well as at Dick Smith and Big W stores.

Neil Lindsay, v-p, Amazon Kindle, said the new store "is customized for Australian customers, with local bestsellers and curated lists relevant to Australians, and many titles from local publishers and authors."

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Amazon's announcement earlier this week that it will offer Sunday delivery to Prime members in several markets through the U.S. Postal Service was quickly followed by news that the U.K. will also be part of the experiment. The Bookseller reported that the online retailer will make Sunday deliveries in London "throughout the Christmas period" according to a company spokesman, who added: "As part of our 'Amazon Logistics' program, we work with local and regional carriers from across the capital who will be making deliveries every day of the week for the remainder of the festive period."

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Back in the U.S., Wired noted that the Sunday service's "weirder aspect is the way a single for-profit company seems to have deputized a government agency to serve its particular private interest. Could Walmart now ask, for instance, for a similar Sunday option? For anyone who has waited in an interminable Post Office line only to be treated like garbage at the counter, the desire to force the Postal Service to run itself more like a business is understandable. Without incentive to do better, the experience seems likely to keep sucking.

"Tabling the issue of whether fault really lies with the agency itself or with Congress, however, the Postal Service for now remains a public utility. If it takes a private company to save it, it's hard to see it as public anymore. Then again, as one of the brands apparently most admired by the public, maybe no one would mind if Amazon ran the mail. Instead of stamps, think Post Office Prime."

Fortune observed that if "the USPS does open up the service to other organizations, the discomfort around the Amazon deal will dissipate, and it will no longer seem like Jeff Bezos is Postmaster General for one day per week. That's likely to happen: the Postal Service has a program offering 'negotiated service agreements' to private companies as a way to boost revenues, which have dwindled as daily mail volume has decreased. The Amazon deal is, by a significant margin, the biggest such agreement to date."