German Kindle-Shop books appear like magic in UK store

I’ve long been a customer of German Amazon where I used to buy DVDs and books which would appear on my doorstep just as quickly as local stuff. I can still log on to either amazon.de or amazon.co.uk and use my UK account without let or hinderance. So news of the German Kindle store was interesting.

I’ve been sitting on a rather large and unwieldy volume of Sebastian Fitzek’s pscycho-thriller Der Augensammler (The Eye Collector) ever since Christmas when it arrived as a present. Even though the first two chapters looked promising, I didn’t get beyond one pair of eyes before I was fed up reading a real book of that size and weight.

So why not download it from the new German Kindle store? At first I came up against a brick wall. I visited the German “Kindle-Shop” and found the book, pressed the button to buy it, only to be told that my account is UK based and I must buy from the UK Kindle store. This seemed like a dead end, but just on the offchance I decided to search for the German book in the UK store. Lo and behold, it appeared, albeit at a ridiculously high price of £13.25.

It seems, then, that as Amazon add more Kindle stores in other countries and language areas it should be possible to search for the full inventory using your local account. It seems too good to be true but I’m not complaining, except about the price. I suspect there are some restrictions based on copyright and distribution agreements, so whole catalogues might not be available. It’s good start for internationalists, though.