They’ll not sell me a Kindle paperwhite.
Not from the UK for delivery to Portugal, not from Amazon.com, nor even the .com international site.
A Kindle, yes, but not the paperwhite.
Anyone know what’s going on here?
Bit strange from Amazon
December 27th, 2012 · 9 Comments
Tags: The Blogger Himself
9 responses so far ↓
1 Philip Scott Thomas // Dec 27, 2012 at 7:25 pm
No idea why, but easy enough to get around.
Use Amazon.co.uk to buy one as a gift for a UK-based mate and have the mate ship it out to you in Portugal. I’ve used the Amazon.com site from the UK to buy gifts for family and friends in the US with no problems. Amazon deals with the currency exchange palaver for you.
2 Alex Hern // Dec 27, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Amazon has constrained supply on the Kindle Paperwhite, and loses money on every one sold.
They aim to make back that money by selling books; but when matched to the constrained supply, they clearly want to sell Paperwhites only to those who will actually use them to buy Kindle books.
Since the Kindle bookstore in Portuguese is tiny – around 1000 books? – Amazon basically assumes they won’t make back their investment selling to you.
Maybe if Amazon could institute a different queueing system – people who have bought more than 10 English books from them in the last year get first dibs? – it’d do better. But I doubt they could without a PR disaster.
In short: Get it shipped to a country with a viable Kindle bookstore.
3 bloke in france // Dec 27, 2012 at 10:53 pm
There might also be a problem downloading e books to foreign countries? I buy books from .co.uk but notice the kindle edition is not available in France. Some VAT / tax issue, probably.
No point having a kindle with a pure white screen so check out some actual titles first, Tim.
4 Dave // Dec 28, 2012 at 4:49 am
“the kindle edition is not available in [country]”
If you’re voluntarily offering to give them money for something available for free, and they won’t take it, that’s their problem, not yours.
5 dearieme // Dec 28, 2012 at 2:07 pm
I got a Kindle for Xmas and my wife won a Kobo in a raffle. Any advice on exploiting this pairing?
6 John B // Dec 28, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Mr W: it could be an issue with your credit card. If you are using a UK card on-line from outside the UK to ship outside the UK, to avoid card fraud such transactions are sometimes blocked.
The same may be true if you are using a Portuguese card to make an on-line purchase from the UK.
You know how important it is to bother law abiding citizens going bout their day to day legitimate activities in order to prevent drug lords and terrorists from moving funds… something with which they clearly have no problem.
7 Matthew L // Dec 29, 2012 at 3:59 am
dearieme: Ooo-er.
8 WCWC // Dec 29, 2012 at 7:52 am
I got my first Kindle (2nd gen) from the USA store shipped to Hong Kong no problem, but since then they have restricted international shipping to the basic model ($89). So I ordered a Paperwhite from another website that buys them in Europe and brings them over in a suitcase I think. Inconvenient but not much else I could do without inconveniencing a friend in the US/UK.
9 James James // Dec 31, 2012 at 2:35 am
eBay!
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