Amazon starts selling Kindle Paperwhite and Fire HD in China
Amazon (s AMZN) started selling Kindle e-readers and tablets in China on Friday. The front-lit Kindle Paperwhite e-reader is ¥849 (USD $138), and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD is ¥1499 (USD $244) for the 16 GB version and ¥1799 (USD $293) for the 32 GB version.
Amazon launched a Chinese Kindle store, with iOS (s AAPL) and Android (s GOOG) apps for reading ebooks, in December. The store contained around 25,000 ebooks at launch and is now up to about 47,000 titles. When I surfed around a Google Translated version of the store today, I noticed that the device page translates as “Optional Kindle device,” perhaps to remind users that they don’t actually have to buy a Kindle in order to read ebooks. Most of the books in the Chinese Kindle store are priced very, very low, with the top 15 bestselling books in the store all priced under 3 yuan (USD $0.49) and many at 1 yuan (USD $0.16).
Amazon also launched an Android app store in China last month.