Hard Evidence: Kindle Going Global -- Very Soon!!??

We here at Kindle Nation stand ready to change the name of our karass at any time as circumstances dictate, but don't worry, we're not thinking of selling naming rights to the Nation. We were thinking Kindle World, but of course someone has come along and scarfed up that name, and anyway, we don't want to lag behind Mr. Bezos in his vision of a Kindle future. So, what would you say to Kindle Cosmos?

But what we want to share is actually less goofy and more exciting. Readers all around the world have been wondering when they might see the Kindle in their countries, and now we have the first cold, hard indication that the Kindle is about to cross international borders. Okay, we don't know exactly when, but we received an email from digitalrights@amazon.com this afternoon -- under the intriguing title "Territory Updates" -- which said the following among other things:

Dear Kindle Publishing Partner:

This is a periodic reminder regarding how to set territory sales restrictions for your Kindle titles. As with the other metadata for your titles, you as the publisher are responsible for communicating this information to us. If you have questions not answered by these instructions, please feel free to direct them to: digitalrights@amazon.com.

Please remember that neglecting to communicate territory sales restrictions to us will result in a “no restrictions” (global rights) setting....

Individual or multiple countries are entered into one of two fields: the “Territory” field (indicating where we can sell your book), or the “Exclude Territory” field (indicating that we can sell the book everywhere except the indicated country/ies).

It's true that the message begins by referring to itself as a "periodic" message, but this is the first message of this kind that we have ever received despite having been in touch with Amazon staff at digitalrights@amazon.com since 2006.

Our interpretation: Amazon is getting close enough to launching the Kindle in countries other than the U.S. that the company is focusing on publisher contract and rights issues for those countries. In addition to being big news for prospective Kindle owners in those countries, this is also big for Kindle authors, publishers, and bloggers as well as American Kindle owners who may want to take advantage of international Whispernet connections in the future.