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BARCELONA , Spain- Amazon has launched a Spanish Kindle Store, as well as its first Spanish-language Kindle hardware. Also launched Thursday is an Italian Kindle, along with an Italian e-book catalog. These join the already-available German and French Kindle Stores. Visitors to Amazon.es will now be able to buy the Kindle Touch in Spanish for $99 ($134), and choose from a catalog of 900,000 titles in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician.
Many of these titles were already available from the newly-launched Spanish Amazon, but the English-language Kindles needed read them had to be ordered from overseas.
In addition to regular books there is also short-form content from national Spanish newspapers El País and La Vanguardia.
And it's about time.
According to Wolfram Alpha's data, there are 403 million native Spanish speakers to English's 371 million. Worldwide, there are 417 million, making it one of the world's most widespread languages. It is also a language containing much of the planet's great literature. What took so long?
Perhaps it was inertia on the part of Spain's publishers, which I hear over and over are slow to change. Or perhaps its a slow adoption of technology here. In Barcelona, where I live, e-book readers and iPhones were almost never seen until recently, and iPads are so rare I have seen only a handful in almost two years.
Now, years after launch, it seems that everybody has an iPhone, and when I am forced to take a trip on the metro I see e-readers in the hands of the young and old. Crucially, though, almost none of them are Kindles. Instead, they're no-name brands like Woxster.
The Kindle might yet clean up, though, as even the worst of these e-readers cost the same or more than the Kindle Touch, and none of them make it as easy to buy content as Amazon does.
Clearly the e-reader market is an international one, and finally -- just four years after the Kindle debuted -- Amazon is taking it seriously.
Kindle product page [Amazon Spain]
Amazon.es Launches Spanish Kindle Store and First Spanish-Language Kindle [Press Release]
