Ever since the kindle launched to great success and popularity across the pond UK ebook lovers have been salivating at the prospect of being able to get into the Kindle experience on our shores and asking when will it hit the UK?

At first glance you would think it would be here already – most mainstream consumer products launch pretty quickly over here after their US release but not the Kindle. There appear to be 2 main sticking points:

• Agreeing with publishers to make the books available

Despite the myriad of ebook readers now available there is still only a limited amount of ebooks available from a limited set of publishers – and the pricing is often poor compared to the paperback versions of the same books.  Amazons marketing muscle could probably solve this one pretty easily though.

• Agreeing with mobile networks to distribute the ebooks

In the US, “Whispernet”, the Sprint EVDO network Amazon uses, allows the kindle to download books from the amazon store anywhere in the country so no need for a wifi connection or even a pc to download the book or manage your account.  So far European telecoms operators seem reluctant to broker a similar deal and until Amazon can agree this it will stall the Kindles march into the UK and indeed Europe.

Recent talks with German telecoms operators T-Mobile and Vodafone have stalled, with Amazon unwilling to meet the financial demands of the mobile operators, which looks bleak for a German Kindle.
So the question remains – when will we see kindle in the UK?