Amazon’s Kindle goes multilingual

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The Kindle 3 was announced last evening.

The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader.

Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual.

Last year, I asked where was Kindle’s support for non-Latin characters.

I was happy to find this morning, buried in the product description for the Kindle 3, this product blurb:

Support for New Characters
Kindle can now display Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts.

This is great to see. I guess asking for bidi support (Arabic and Hebrew) would have been a bit too much.

PS: I’ve got a book on the Kindle now — though only in plain ol’ Latin script. Still, this is great news for when my book is translated into Russian, Japanese, etc. I can dream…

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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