It turns out the Kindle coming to France rumor was true. Spot on, in fact.
Today Amazon launched the French Kindle Store, complete with a localized version of the Kindle 4 for €99, 35,000 French-language books, hundreds of graphic novels, over 4,000 free classic ebooks, and 825,000 ebooks in English and other languages.
This marks the third international Kindle Store expansion. First it came to the UK last in August of last year, then the German Kindle Store opened just this past April, and now Amazon.fr has its own Kindle Store too.
They have the Kindle 4 up for pre-order, it will be released on October 14th there, but they don’t have the Kindle Touch listed. Maybe they’re going to delay the launch of the Kindle Touch internationally until after December…
In addition to the launch of the French Kindle Store, Amazon.fr announced that authors and publishers can use Kindle Direct Publishing to make their books available in the Amazon.fr Kindle Store.
Here’s more info about the French Kindle Store from the press release:
The French Kindle Store’s vast selection of content includes popular titles from best-selling authors such as Katherine Pancol, Delphine de Vigan, Harlan Coben, Stéphane Hessel, Haruki Murakami, Françoise Bourdin and Michel Houellebecq in a wide range of categories. Customers will also find the largest selection of popular graphic novels available for download including titles from The Largo Winch Series of Francq and Van Hamme, Julia and Roem from Bilal and Walking Dead. Customers can also find top French newspapers and magazines such as Le Monde, Les Echos, Le Figaro, Libération and Aujourd’hui en France/Le Parisien available for single purchase or subscription. Independent authors and publishers can also now use Kindle Direct Publishing to make their books available in Amazon.fr’s Kindle Store.
Also, Amazon updated the Kindle for Android app today to add support for French, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. So it looks like more localized Kindle Stores to come.