Feels like Christmas

Michael Jensen | 11/25/2009

So the Kindle comes to Canada. Finally.

What that means to Canadian publishers is that the toe of their stocking may be squarish this Christmas. And by January they’ll have hands-on experience. And by February they’ll be wanting to get their books into Kindle format right away.

Amazon Kindle is a tiny market compared to print, but the Kindle is still (for now) the biggest digital marketplace around.

Getting into it is pretty simple, especially for publishers of fiction and other text-heavy books. For anything with tables, graphs, images, or complex typography, wait for a year or two. But for long-form and short-form text, it’s worth the investment of a little time and effort.

Surprisingly little.

Amazon provides a Quick Start guide for publishers—and also provides free code-translation and light editing tools to make it relatively easy for publishers to upload and publish a Kindle-ready publication, particularly if you have anyone on staff who understands HTML.

In a few years, Kindle may be the Laserdisk of ebooks—but that’s a few years off. Now’s a good time to get your feet wet with a book or two whose rights are clear, and perhaps whose first-blush sales have peaked.

You then can begin to experiment with the expanding export markets (100 non-US countries) as well as the new Canadian market for Kindle publications—and experiment with methods of promoting the Kindle versions, from your own site, your authors’ sites, and in other venues.

You’ll get hands-on experience, not only with Kindle and its marketplace, but the experience of having a Kindle ebook or two that you can show off to authors and friends.

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