Global Kindle

Amazon has expanded its Kindle self publishing platform, otherwise known as the Digital Text Platform, to allow authors worldwide to push out their content. “The scheme, which was only available in the US previously, will support English, German and French languages, but neither Mandarin or Spanish, two more popular languages. Amazon has confirmed that it will be adding more languages to the Kindle in the forthcoming months. Published works can then be sold through Kindle store to customers across the world who can download them to their Kindle devices over the air for a fee of which Amazon will keep 65 percent (ed: that is shocking). However, the DTP is not without flaws, as reported by Betanews’ Tim Conneally, Kindle supports only Latin-1 ASCII alphabet and ignores the nine other ISO 8859 8-bit alphabet sets. The Kindle DX e-reader is expected to be launched over the next few days in the UK and in more than 100 other countries.”