My first question was simple — is Rogers the official carrier for the Kindle? The answer is no. The Kindle is run on the “AT&T Global Network”. That is the line in the press materials. That is the line from Amazon directly. Rogers has not made an announcement regarding the Kindle and when I asked if they would, they wouldn’t confirm either way. So I speculate that if there was negotiations to have a tier-one level partner in Canada then they fell apart. To take advantage of the Christmas-window Amazon couldn’t delay an announcement much beyond now so I figure they just went ahead with it.

Peering with a Canadian carrier via AT&T means the Kindle will only work in areas where there is  Edge/3g coverage. The map at the Kindle store shows the extent of that coverage in Canada.

This is essentially the exact same as the coverage map from Rogers with one important difference. As I have written about before Rogers has recently adopted the more advanced HSPA protocol (the areas in yellow) and has moved away from the 3g technology in the Kindle. That means Kindle will connect via the inferior 2G EDGE technology most places in Canada or the signal will need to be upconverted to HSPA through some other means. Books tend not to be network-intensive so I am not sure that makes a big difference in download performance, but it does speak to how future-proof the device may be in Canada once Rogers completely abandons EDGE.

On the content front, it looks like Canadians are charged a $2.10 premium (after exchange) on most books. Amazon is pushing all customers no matter the country of origin to a single destination (www.amazon.com/kindlestore) where price and availability differs based on what country you choose from the drop down menu. Prices are different but they are all listed USD. The good news for Amazon.ca shoppers is the login credentials for .CA work at the Kindle store.  You don’t need to create a separate account. I asked Amazon specifically if they had plans to offer ebooks for sale at Amazon.ca and they dodged the question.

Canadian newspapers have been added to the selection at the Kindlestore. No mention of Canadian blogs. The web browser in the Canadian version is unavailable. I am not sure if Canadians can use Feedbooks as a hack or not.

That is pretty much it.

In poking around the Rogers.com website  I did happen upon the press release reprinted in its entirety below (sorry I couldn’t just link to it). Jasper Wireless is Amazon’s wireless provider for the US-only Kindle. I asked Rogers if their deal with Jasper was in any way tied to today’s Kindle announcement and they said Jasper deal was “separate” from anything related to the Kindle.

Who knows, maybe the next Kindle will arrive accompanied by a Canadian store and a Canadian carrier deal. We will have to wait until after Christmas to see.

1. Amazon does not want to launch the Kindle in a market adjacent to its own. If this was true Mexico, as well as Canada, would be excluded from the rollout. The new Kindle is launching in Mexico so unless there is a particular concern about adjacent English-language markets, then this seems unlikely.
2. Amazon can’t get agreements from Canadian rights holders. Unlike the UK, titles often release in Canada at the same time as they do in the US. Simultaneous title releases from different vendors that are geographically adjacent may be the problem. This seems unlikely because this hasn’t been an issue for the Sony Reader in Canada, but Amazon’s press release isn’t clear on whether international customers need to buy from the US store when a national store exists. The problem might be on their side. Amazon might have an internal problem allocating sales on Amazon.ca and this might be holding things up. Again unlikely.
3. Amazon may be having difficulty negotiating roaming rates with Rogers — the Canadian wireless carrier — that handles AT&Ts visiting customers. Rogers can be difficult at times but there is no reason to think they are being difficult in this case. Rogers may be angling for a direct relationship with Amazon that excludes AT&T, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have had this in place today.
4. The problem could be the radio in the new Kindle. This is my hunch, but it is also the most complicated to explain. In February I speculated the lack of Kindle in Canada had to do with Amazon’s existing arrangement with Sprint-network-affiliate Jasper Wireless. Jasper had to get its business revved up or Amazon was going to dump them. With the international version Sprint, Jasper, and their CDMA-EVDO technology is formally dumped. The new Kindle uses the rival GSM technology. A GSM enabled Kindle should have been a good news story for Canadian readers but things have changed in the Canadian wireless market since February. None of the three Canadian carriers are using GSM anymore and I not sure the new HSDPA technology that Bell, Telus, and Rogers have migrated to is backwards compatible with the GSM radio in the Kindle. It really depends on what specs Amazon built into the new device.

For those Canadian readers who may be shocked to hear that Canadian mobile carriers are too advanced for the new Kindle, be reminded that a fourth major wireless carrier — Wind Mobile — is readying for launch in this country. Telus and Bell rushed their HSDPA upgrade to market so Wind Mobile would not be the sole alternative to customers (particularly iPhone customers) looking to escape from Rogers. And Rogers itself has quietly been upgrading their GSM service to HSDPA over the past couple of years. They completed the upgrade a few months ago.

This fourth theory could be debunked if I knew if other all- HSDPA markets were getting the new Kindle. Unfortunately I don’t know if any countries on the list of 100 countries is all HSDPA like Canada is. If anyone that reads this knows, or otherwise finds the HSDPA theory specious,  please speak up.

(my original why no Kindle in Canada post)

UPDATED: The Kindle Product page indicates that there is coverage for US customers in Canada. That pretty much blows the incompatibility argument out the window. So what is different between two markets? The only thing I can think of is concerns over shipping and the Amazon.com/ca. Fingers crossed we get this before the Holiday.

Amazon’s continued land grab of promising book-related start-ups has a feeling of inevitability in it. Who else has the cash and the vision to buy this companies?

Processing. Processing…

I can’t think of anyone who is leaning into the changes in the industry as aggressively as Amazon is.

Ingram? They are amalgating their businesses and aren’t yet ready to buy new ones.
B&N? Perhaps too conservative. Perhaps too poor. Perhaps a culture predisposed to build and not to buy.

Indigo is the only company in the world I can think of that that is well positioned to rival Amazon in acquisitions. They are out of debt. They have direct long-term interest in this space (unlike Apple or Google). They have shown a willingness to both innovate (Shortcovers) and expand (Pistachio). And they have experience merging with another company (Chapters — whether that merger is successful however is debatable).

So what’s holding them back? Vision? Leadership? A regional mentality? My bet is there are people in the organization that could lead Indigo’s acquisition of start-ups but those people and those ideas and those companies aren’t finding their way in front of the decision maker(s). Call it a chilling effect. If you are a VP and you bring forward an idea that fails, you wear it. That is the downside of the sole-proprietor model. Shame.

If the Kindle is a StormTrooper then is the iPhone a Sith Lord? It doesn’t really matter. Spread the word that both Amazon’s Audible and the Amazon Kindle are closed platforms that use DRM. These are anti-consumer offerings. Bezos knows how to be open when it suits him (the Amazon Mp3 store) so demand the same for ebooks. Get the address of a publisher from the frontmatter of your favourite book and send a letter to the people that make the books. Ask them to sell you  digital books, not just rent them to you via Amazon. Or simply vote with your wallet. Demand Amazon and Audible drop their DRM before you give them your money. Expect more. And remember stay classy.

A good place to start would be vanity urls for every author. I can’t believe amazon.com/stephen-king is 404. Get on that filedby, you can’t afford to make a wrong move now.

Of particular interest is the right hand column on this chart. It is almost empty. No Prime Shipping. No toys. No digital media. We just don’t have the density to make it worth Amazon’s time. I had hoped the the lack of shipping costs would make the MP3 store at least viable in Canada. By the looks of it they won’t even start thinking of us until 2016.

via Andrea James at the Intelligencer

This is being spun as both a green initative and a frustration-free customer experience. What exactly is green about having two sets of packaging for a single item? It is not landfill space they are saving here. It is space on the trucks. It is fuel. It is all about lowering their own Prime-o shipping charges. This is the walmart school of consversation. Commendable but not imbued with the highest sentiment what ever the spin.

Brian McBride, the head of Amazon UK, gets a pleasant write-up at the Bookseller. He talks Kindle (coming soon) and about Amazon’s growth. His “Crunch? What crunch?” stance also gets some play at the timesonline.co.uk. I particularly liked his line that I put in the title of this post. What a great attitude towards change. Appropriate for bookshop owners and publishers alike.

This is pretty passive browsing. The product categories are shown in vertical columns. When a user selects the book category, the description from the first book is read aloud (another reason to polish your copy). When that is done, the description of the next book is read automatically.

This is a polished proof of concept, but seriously, who actually window shops for books? Seeing the cover isn’t that helpful. I quickly clicked into the product landing page for the books I was interested in. And I wanted to control what book was next. I couldn’t.

To improve the experience the site merchandisers need to tell a story rather than simply plugging in popular books that are new and hot. It would work a lot better if all the books were say mystery books and the audio told you why each book would be a good Christmas gift. Of course the production time/costsof that kind of thing wouldn’t scale very well.

That said I hope to see the windowshop.com technology as a surface layer over the main Amazon site. Maybe that is the plan. I hope so. Yes visual search concepts are everywhere this year, but until they offer something more compelling than text search they will remain merely a complimentary stream.

When I first saw this feature, I thought no big deal. Google is trying to keep searchers within their ecosystem for longer. Consumers looking for sites with bad internal search will benefit. You can bypass Canadiantire.ca‘s stupid postal code prompt. Hooray! Consumers looking for sites with a good experience will find no value add. Doing a secondary search within results from Flickr is almost meaningless for instance. You want the extra context the site provides — i.e., you want to actually look at the photos.

What Google’s Secondary Search Means for Book Retail

It was interesting to note, when this launched on March 4/08, that Google’s secondary search was offered for Amazon.ca but not for Chapters.indigo.ca. As the New York Times indicates, Amazon asked that Google remove the option. Not sure if Indigo was overlooked or did a pre-empt. But it is arguable that book retail is actually one of those areas where the context added is valuable and should be exclusive. Sure Amazon spends a whack of capital maintaining their search experience — but it isn’t the be all and end all for consumers. When I include ‘Amazon’ in my search query — most of the time — I am trying to narrow the results to the book category, not to the retailer. The context I want most is the book itself, not the retailer’s purchase funnel. Eventually I will get in the habit of capitalizing on Google’s book search capability. I will confidently type ‘book’ to narrow results to the category level then sidelink from there if I want to purchase. If Amazon/Indigo were smart they would accept this reality. It isn’t always about buying something. Work with Google to make the secondary search better (include book cover images, community pages, list results, a call to action, etc.). In effect, use the secondary search as a brand building tool. You will lose page views in the short term, but you will gain brand awareness in the long run.

First Book Publishers, Now Book Retailers, Must Learn to Love Google

In a day and age when I can buy Harry Potter at the dry cleaners, book retailers need to sell me on their brand experience. They can do that best by opening up. Running from the Google borg only perpetuates the status quo — Amazon’s market dominance. As the market shifts from text-in-print to text-on-screen that isn’t doing the consumer any favours. Oops. There I go again, thinking this isn’t about the money (Google’s ads, Amazon’s transactions, publisher’s sales). How naive.