Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Amazon launches Kindle store in Australia

Amazon has launched a Kindle store in Australia and is now selling locally published ebooks.

The Kindle store went live this morning at www.amazon.com.au, a domain name that the retailer has owned since 2004 and which previously directed Australian consumers to the amazon.co.uk site. Amazon has had an Australian business name registered since 1998.

Amazon said in a statement today that the Australian Kindle store currently offers more than two million ebooks, including more than 400,000 Kindle-exclusive titles. Among the local publishers with content available from the store are Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Hardie Grant, Allen & Unwin, Bloomsbury, Text Publishing, Scribe, Black Inc., University of Queensland Press and Fremantle Press.

New release titles tend to be priced around $10 to $20. The listings for a number of local publishers, including Penguin, Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, include the line ‘this price was set by the publisher’, while other publishers’ listings refer to a Digital List Price (or ebook RRP) and Kindle Price, which is often discounted.   

Amazon has also announced that authors who self-publish through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) can now make their books available through the Amazon.com.au site and can set the price of their books in Australian dollars. Local authors can choose to receive payments in either Australian or New Zealand dollars.

The retailer also announced that the Kindle Fire HD and the Kindle Fire HDX tablets are now available in Australia through Dick Smith and Big W stores, which have sold Kindle devices since 2011, and that the Kindle Reading App will be pre-installed on all Android phones sold on Telstra contracts.

The launch of an Australian Kindle store has been the subject of rumour and speculation for some time, including in August when representatives from Amazon met with local book publishers during recent visits to Australia. As reported by Books+Publishing at the time, the launch of an Australian Amazon ebookstore was believed to be scheduled to launch before Christmas.

 

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Category: Local news