The Kindle Store is Now Live in Canada
There’s only so many times that the Canadian government, which is notoriously hostile to foreign investment, government can "lose" your paperwork and make you resubmit it, and something tells me that Canada has hit that point with Amazon.
Early this morning David Gaughran tipped me to the news that Amazon was now mentioning a Canadian Kindle Store in their correspondence with KDP authors. After doing some digging of my own, I can see that he is correct.
Update: The Kindle Store is live on Amazon.ca.
Have you ever spent some time looking at the report pages at KDP? There’s a lot of different ways to generate sales reports: date, title, and most importantly, by market. Amazon will let you generate a sales report for each of their local Kindle Stores (amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.br, etc).
And as of today, Amazon will let me generate a sales report for Amazon.ca. Given that Amazon does not yet sell Kindles or Kindle ebooks on their Canadian website, this is a rather curious detail.
Update: Amazon has not yet updated the entire Amazon.ca website, but I can now see Kindle ebooks on the site. There’s no mention of the Kindle hardware, though, just the ebook and the apps. I also have not yet gotten a press release announcement from Amazon.
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Amazon has been selling Kindles and Kindle ebooks to Canadians since the Kindle Store went international in 2009, but in spite of the fact that Canada is America’s closest neighbor, Amazon has not opened a local Kindle Store there. Even though Amazon has launched local Kindle Stores in the UK, France, Germany, and even Brazil, there’s never been any sign that Amazon was about to launch a Kindle Store in Canada.
Oh, I’m sure that it was in the works, but I would also put money on the launch being delayed due to the Canadian govt dragging their feet. In fact, I would bet that Amazon started working to launch the Canadian Kindle Store at the same time that they started on the UK Kindle Store. It just took a while to get government approval.
It’s my guess that the Canadian Kindle Store will launch in the next month. I am guessing a month because the last time Amazon leaked details about a Kindle Store launch was with Brazil, and in that case it was about 26 days between the earliest leak and the launch.
Actually, I am expecting the launch to happen some time in the next week. The Christmas season is upon us, and I’m sure Amazon doesn’t want to pass up any chances to sell Kindles.
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