Amazon recently announced that it will make the Kindle available for shipping to over 100 countries, including the Philippines, China, and Europe. This, of course, intensifies the battle in the growing digital book market.
The Amazon Kindle (the 6" international GSM version) was announced to retail at around $279, or over PhP 13000 at current exchange rates. However, this does not yet include custom fees and other taxes. On top of this, Amazon also announced that it will cut the price of the US version from $299 to $259, bringing it closer to its fierce rivals.
Amazon also said that the ebook reader will also host 200,000 English-languages books from a host of publishers and international newspapers. The company further said that the product starts shipping on October 19, though you may already reserve yourself a unit.
The company also denied reports that there is a possibility of creating the Kindle a tablet-like device from which you can also read your emails and surf the Web. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, in an article in Yahoo! News, said that the focus of the company today is improving the reading experience and not compromising it just to be able to include more services.
The nice thing about purchasing the Kindle is that, according to this article from YugaTech.com, accessing the 3G and GPRS networks via the Kindle will be free and without any monthly charges. However, blog subscription and the experimental browser will not be available for the country.
Obviously from here, you can already see where the future of book reading is heading to. There might come a day when students, particularly those medical students who run around the country with a large volume of books, might just carry a Kindle with them simply because it's lighter to carry.
As for me, well, I think I'll pass this time around. I still prefer to read from the good old pages of my books.
