Amazon Begins Selling e-Readers and Tablets in China

Amazon opened up its Kindle store in China last December and also updated its popular reading apps to support complex Chinese characters at the same time. Amazon really wanted to put its e-readers and tablets on sale around the same time, but various regulatory bodies put the kibosh on it. The online giant has worked with the government of China and is now officially selling the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Paperwhite on its main Chinese website. The popular E Ink driven Amazon Kindle Paperwhite e-Reader is now available for ¥849 (USD $138), and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD is ¥1499 (USD $244) for the 16 GB version, and ¥1799 (USD $293) for the 32 GB version. Customers now have the ability to purchase these directly, instead of importing them from abroad. The Chinese Amazon Kindle Store now offers 47,000 ebook titles available in local languages. A number of major publishers have signed up with the service, and now that the hardware is available, it should attract even more to the distribution platform. The e-reader itself will be available online, but Amazon also struck a distribution deal with Suning and Tesco Shi to have the e-reader available in the retail environment.  Customers will be able to purchase them directly in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, and Chengdu. The Amazon Chinese site claims that the Kindle hardware is optional to read ebooks. This is  primarily due to the fact that most tablets purchased in that country tend to be lower-end Android devices. It will be interesting to see if Amazon can be successful at selling ebooks in that market, which is often plagued by online piracy. Amazon Begins Selling e-Readers and Tablets in China is a post from: E-Reader News

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