It has taken Amazon forever, but it has finally happened. The Kindle Paperwhite and basic Kindle are now being sold directly from Amazon’s Canadian website. Up until now all Kindle ereaders ordered from Canada had to be purchased from Amazon’s U.S. store.
Having recently added Kindle ebooks to Amazon.ca, this isn’t much of a surprise, and it certainly makes things easier having Kindle ebooks and Kindle devices being sold from the same place.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets are still not available in Canada, however. At the moment they are only being sold in the U.S. and Europe.
The three models that are available are the $89 basic Kindle, the $139 Kindle Paperwhite, and the $199 Kindle Paperwhite 3G. They don’t have the cheaper “Special Offers” (advertisements) models that are available in the U.S.
As far as the Canadian Kindle ebookstore goes, it doesn’t have as many titles as the U.S. store, and prices seem to vary oddly between the two stores. Amazon boasts that they have over 1.5 million Kindle books on the Canada Kindle store, with over 35,000 free books, 50,000 French-language titles, and 250,000+ exclusive books “customers won’t find anywhere else”.
Now that that’s out of the way it will be interesting to see how long it takes Amazon to start selling their Android apps and Kindle Fire tablets north of the border.