A month or so ago there were plenty of people saying that e-readers were a flash in the pan and that Australians would not have much interest in the Amazon Kindle. It is interesting to see some reverse their opinion in the face of the considerable traffic being generated around the Kindle launch here. As I have blogged for a couple of years, the Kindle and similar devices should not be underestimated. There is a card for this.
E-readers won’t take off here until the copyright issue is sorted out so that Australians can download current & popular titles. At present we can only download older out-of-copyright titles and much dross. Go to sites such as ebooks.com and click on the list of countries that each book is available to; you will rarely find Australia listed. If you try to order it anyway the system reads your IP address and blocks the transaction.
Some of my friends ignored my warnings and purchased Sony readers or Bebook readers. They were quite disappointed to find they could only access crap content in Australia.
It is a similar situation with audible books.
If you are IT literate and know how to spoof your IP address you can get around this limitation but of course that is illegal.