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Kindle store en Espanol
Tuesday, 10th April 2012

By Nancy Davis Kho

Abstract:

Amazon announces a Spanish-language Kindle bookstore and interface with 30,000 titles at launch. Barnes & Noble offers a similar product called Nook Books en Español. With a growing readership of non-English speaking people owning eBook readers, there is a huge potential for a choice of language offerings in this marketplace.

Article:

Good news for Spanish language speakers – Amazon announced yesterday that it is opening a Kindle bookstore for US readers solely devoted to Spanish-language books, along with changes to the Kindle interface that more easily facilitate customer support for Spanish-language readers. “eBooks Kindle en Español” offers 30,000 titles at launch, including all of the Spanish-language eBook Nielsen best sellers available and 65 of the top 100 Spanish-language print best sellers.

Sounds like it’s fairly easy to switch to the enhanced Spanish language interface, which includes extensive help pages plus phone and email customer support in Spanish; just change the language to "Spanish" under Store Language Preference in Manage Your Kindle, and aquí es.

Barnes & Noble already has a similar offering for Nook readers called Nook Books en Español which has about 45,000 titles. Both eReader vendors are tapping into the small but growing market of US readers for whom English may not be the preferred language - a savvy move given overall demographics that found that, while Hispanics currently make up only 16% of the population, the Hispanic population accounted for 56% of the nation’s total growth in the first decade of the 21st century. (Figures from the Pew Research Center’s Pew Hispanic Center.)

Hispanics were hit particularly hard by the Great Recession, comprising a disproportionate loss of net worth between 2006 and 2009 compared to other racial and ethnic groups - the same years during which eReader ownership began to skyrocket. Now with the economy getting shakily back to its feet, these readers may finally be ready to purchase eReaders.

Gaining access to non-English speaking readers is going to be key to continuing the blistering growth rates for Nooks, Kindles, and other readers. I mentioned in a post back in October that Amazon planned to roll out an international version of the Kindle to more than 100 countries, but it’s easy to lose track of the fact that there are non-native language speakers living within many of those countries who would be better engaged with a choice of languages.

This Spanish language bookstore represents a strengthened effort reach all the readers in a market, not just the ones who read in English.

By Nancy Davis Kho

With more than a decade of experience in the product management and business development side of online content, Nancy Davis Kho now writes about the rapidly changing environment of digital content and its implications for business.

Nancy is a frequent contributor to EContent Magazine, Streaming Media, Enterprise Search Sourcebook, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her website is at www.daviskho.com.

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