Kindle eBooks Launched In Mexico By Amazon With 70,000 Latin American Novels In Spanish

Amazon announced on Thursday the launching of its Mexican line of Kindle eBooks, with a bookstore that features over 70,000 Spanish-language titles in addition to eBooks in indigenous tongues like Nahuatl. Among those titles are classic works by renowned Mexican and Latin American authors Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Pitol and Carlos Monsiváis. The line also includes classic comics like Mafalda and la Familia Burrón. Independent authors and publishers may also have a reason to rejoice, as Amazon is also premiering Kindle Direct Publishing in the country.

The news comes over a year after Amazon launched a Spanish-language Kindle store for Spanish-speaking users in the United States. The store, called "eBooks Kindle en Español", includes more than 30,000 titles, and users in the US can set their Kindle store to Spanish on any Kindle device. eBooks are growing in popularity in the United States, with some 21 percent of Americans saying they've read an eBook in 2012, up from 17 percent the year before. In the case of Mexico, Amazon hopes that it can reach readers whose access to places where they can buy printed books is limited. "The vast majority of Mexicans do not have access to a bookstore in their town, so we're happy to launch the Mexico Kindle Store today and bring a huge bookstore with over 2 million titles to anyone with an Internet connection," Pedro Huerta, director of Kindle content for Latin America, said in a statement.

According to the Amazon press release, the basic Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite will be sold in Gandhi - one of the largest bookstore chains in Mexico - in its brick and mortar shops for MXN $1,399, or USD $105. "In order to provide a new experience and bring books to all our customers in an innovative way, we will offer Amazon's Kindle in all of our bookstores. We believe it is a great option to enjoy reading at an affordable price. We are confident it will have very good acceptance by readers," said Alberto Achar, Marketing Manager at Gandhi.

The expansion of the eBook division into Mexico takes place following the company's announcement this past June that it would open up a Kindle store in India. The company said that the Mexico Kindle Store would offer about 1,000 eBooks with prices starting as low as MXN $9, or less than USD$1.

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