UK Kindle Store launch gets a date

Yesterday, Amazon suddenly and suspiciously ran out of Kindles. This morning, a couple of third-gen readers appeared from the great bookshop in the cloud. Exciting stuff, but nothing to scare the local librarian.

That was left to a second announcement. The UK will be getting its own Kindle Store on August 27, with over 400,000 titles and the promise of the lowest prices of any ebook shop in the UK. Add a catalogue of over a million free books (the new Kindle will hold 3500 of them) and the promise of 85 of the top 100 Neilsen UK Bestsellers and that’s quite a start. For both Amazon and the librarian.

It may also come as a bit of a fright to iriver and WH Smith, who recently announced a partnership in a bid to make a march on the burgeoning British ebook scene.

If British readers have a rightful beef, it’s that the US bookseller hasn’t seen fit to use the local parlance of one of the world’s best-read nations and the country with the richest literary history in the west. It’s a shop, Amazon, not a store. Sigh...

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