Meconomy now available on the Kindle
Ok, so everyone is talking about the iPad this weekend. And rightly so. But I have news concerning a different piece of hardware: From today on, my new book Meconomy is available on the Amazon Kindle platform as well. Earlier in the year I had published it as a PDF on my website, as EPUB, iPhone App – and, hey, even on good old paper (as print on demand). Why did it take so long to put it on the Kindle?
Three reason: First until some weeks ago Amazon didn’t let publishers outside the US upload content to their Kindle Shop at all. When they finally opened their Digital Text Platform for Europe it turned out you couldn’t turn in PDFs or Word-Docs without losing all your formatting. So basically it took a while for my clever assistant Karo to finetune all layout-glitches for Kindle. Finally when all was set Amazon proved to be quite strict in terms of copyright. At first they simply didn’t believe that I, the author, owned all rights to my book. To be fair this is a pretty unusal fact indeed.
But now all is good and today I got an email telling me that Meconomy is finally available in the Kindle Store. This is not to be confused with the main Amazon book area, where you also can find Meconomy – on paper. Fun fact: As far as I know I am the first German book publisher at all to feature my content on the Kindle. Until now all you can get in the store in German is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
I didn’t find the time or resources to translate Meconomy yet – the book is in German only. So if you are German but live abroad… if you are not but want to practice the language… or if you are looking for a gift for a German friend – now you can get hold of Meconomy in all formats, including Kindle. Enjoy!
Interestingly the pictures you see here are not from the actual Kindle version but have been sent to me by reader Rene Klimkeit some weeks ago. He simply bought the PDF and put it on his Kindle. Looks pretty fine to me, but of course that way you cannot vary textsize but have a fixed layout. This is different when you buy the book from the Kindle Store, so I encourage Kindle-owners to opt for that version (though I earn dramatically less per book when selling via Amazon).
As for the iPad: I’m sure it’s a stunning device. I will certainly get one. And I’m already working on some pretty cool ideas for it – one related to the book, one to magazine publishing. So check back on my blog or on Twitter to learn more soon.
