Once again, Israel is left out in the cold. The 100 countries that Amazon will be selling its new international version of the Kindle to does not include Israel. If you’re willing to go to Cyprus, though, they’ll be happy to sell you one. But you still won’t get all the content of the American version.

The Kindle, of course, is Amazon’s nifty e-book reader that lets you buy and download books, magazines, newspapers etc. directly from the Amazon bookstore to your Kindle device. Beginning October 19, an Amazon statement says, the “Amazon Kindle is now for sale to customers in more than 100 countries…’We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books,’ said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO.  ‘Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds.’”

Why not Israel? We’ll get to that a little later. First, though, I have to give props to Amazon as one of the few U.S. online stores willing to take Israeli credit cards. If you’ve ever tried to order anything using an Israeli card from any department store site, Wal-Mart, Buy.com, and a slew of others, you’ve felt the burning shame of rejection. Not at Amazon, though, which is open-minded enough to take the money you’re offering them for whatever it is they’re selling. They’ll even ship many (but certainly not all) items to Israel. But you can order anything with your Israeli credit card and ship to a U.S. address (if you don’t have one, try http://www.mustop.co.il/).

So you’d think that Israel, with its large community of English language speakers and readers, would be a natural for the Kindle. But not so fast; digital rights aren’t the same as “traditional” rights, as far as purchasers and suppliers are concerned. Just like you can’t buy music from the iTunes store if you’re doing it in Israel (you can’t even download the free music on the iTunes site!), you can’t buy MP3s from Amazon. But, you can order any CD you want and have it shipped here. Why? Because of fears of piracy, many music publishers fear selling outside the U.S., where DRM laws may be more lax.

That’s understandable. But the story with Kindle is somewhat different. Although e-books (and Kindle books) can be pirated, anyone downloading them directly to the device must be registered with Amazon, and the device must be registered as well. Of course, you can easily load stolen e-books (in .txt format) on a Kindle, but you could do that anyway, with a Kindle or any other e-book reader, or even on your computer. In other words, it’s not the Kindle sales model that is the problem here; that’s rock solid, and there would be no reason for publishers to fear piracy using the Kindle download model. Besides, most pirates aren’t going to bother to spend $300 for the Kindle anyway, when there are far cheaper alternatives for reading e-books (like on your cellphone).

So what’s the issue? I got a hint from a New York Times article on the story, where the author writes the following: “One challenge for publishers is navigating complex foreign rights issues: Books are often published by different companies and bear different prices in each country.” In other words, there are pre-existing agreements between distributors of books for publishers, and those distributors will want a piece of the action.

In Israel, the chief distributor of English language books is Steimatzky. A few years ago, you may recall,  a mini-scandal erupted when an importer began buying best-selling books in the U.S. at wholesale prices and shipping them to Israel – and was still able to sell the books at significantly lower prices than Steimatzky did. And Steimatzky screamed bloody murder, threatened to sue – and, pulling out its trump card, threatened to withhold sales from stores that bought books from this importer (an act that would be illegal in lots of places). All this, because they had more or less cornered the market on book imports, and weren’t willing to share. You can witness for yourself the power of Steimatzky’s near monopoly by taking a ride to the Bnei Brak Industrial Zone (near the Ayalon Mall), where you will see one of the biggest warehouses of any type in Israel – bearing the name Steimatzky. Is that the reason Amazon won’t/can’t sell the Kindle here? I can’t say, as I don’t have any inside info. But is Steimatzky likely to ask for a piece of the action? I wouldn’t be surprised.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 12:45 am and is filed under gadgets, hi-tech, israel, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.