Mobile, an online mobile phone trade magazine, reported yesterday that Amazon is in the late stage, advanced negotiations with a mobile operator and manufacturer, Qualcomm. WiFi connectivity is thought to have been the biggest hurdle for an earlier UK launch after negotiations with big players such as Vodafone, Orange and 3 all broke down around 6 months ago.

The online retailer is busily working towards a launch in advance of the Christmas shopping period by also securing deals with news and magazine publishers, as well as a range of book publishers. If this launch goes ahead, Amazon will be in a good position to establish and defend against other talked about ebook reader launches plus the traction that the likes of Sony are enjoying. With Google and Apple both currently re-moulding the traditional book market, an Amazon Kindle launch will take publishing and reading on leaps and bounds if the launch is by any way as successful as it has been over the other side of the Atlantic.

Whilst one Amazon spokesman said “we have previously announced that we are looking to release the Kindle with our international cusomter. At the moment, we have no timeline” another sounded more upbeat, saying”there’s no reason we can’t do it. We have a billing arrangement already with customers, and have fantastic relationships with the hardware community”.

In other major European countries, the big mobile operators have gone ahead with their own ebook readers. Vodafone has launched one in Germany whilst France will soon see Orange launch a digital book reader soon. Details of Amazon’s mobile connectivity plans are still unknown but we’ll keep a close eye out and report as and when we know.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, has revolutionised the publishing world already with some reports claiming that 26% of book sales in North America, since November 2007, were of the ebook kind.

One things for sure. This launch is exciting for the whole of the UK ebook reader market. Whether Amazon Kindle will clean up, or simply be the spark plug for the whole ebook world, it is a good thing. How the other manufacturers will repond, especially Sony, will be interesting to witness. Thinkeink has featured some of the new generation ebook readers from Samsung and Fujitsu, to name a few. We’d like to see these gearing up quicker for UK launches sometime in the nearer future now. Fingers crossed and get ready for an exciting 2010 in the ebook reader world.

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?

First impressions, I have to say are not good. It does however look better in the flesh than in the pre release photos but this is not a thing of beauty. It certainly looks “clunkier” than the sony reader or Irex Iliad. The main reason for this is the full qwerty keyboard situated in the bottom half of the Kindle (something which sets it apart from other ebook readers on the market). This extra functionality provided by the keyboard could be critical in the success of the Kindle as Amazon has created a very different product from the others on the market. As the Kindle is meant for use on its own, all actions like buying a book, checking a word in the dictionary or searching wikipedia need to be done on the device itself hence the need for a full set of keys.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of the kindle is it’s wireless connectivity, called whispernet. With EV-DO from sprint built in the Kindle can go to the Kindle Amazon store wherever you are – in the garden on a sunny day or laying in bed at night. The kindle store has over 100,000 books already available and after choosing what you want to read its delivered to the kindle in around a minute and best sellers cost around $9.99. And books aren’t the only thing you can read, newspaper and magazine subscriptions are available as well.

The kindle also features a web browser to view websites and blogs and limited e-mail functionality (Amazon charges $0.10 to convert your e-mail to the kindle).  The web browsing is free however and although some sites won’t function (flash for instance) most text based sites are pretty readable especially if you use an rss client like the excellent google reader.

So how does the Kindle stack up?  Well it certainly brings a lot more features to the party than any other Ebook reader has to date, the wireless connectivity for buying books and browsing the web.  An A for effort then but what really lets this product down is the design.  I just don’t think it looks like a product people want to buy despite the good functionality.  So maybe it’s not the Ipod for Ebooks but it could well be the first step in that direction.