Get out the wooden shoes and dust off the windmill; the Kindle could be coming to Holland next year.
Amazon are reportedly in talks with the Dutch trade group Boek.be as part of a negotiation to bring Flemish Dutch ebooks to the Kindle. There’s nothing definite yet, but the director of Boek.be is hopeful. “The negotiations are cautious,” said Geert Joris, director of Boek.be. “But it would not surprise me if Dutch ebooks were read on a Kindle in 2012. “
Boek.be are the combined trade group for Flemish publishers, importers, and booksellers in the Netherlands, so even negotiating is a good sign. With luck there will be enough publishers participating in the discussions that singing a deal with individual publishers will be a formality.
Update: A couple of commenters have pointed out that I didn’t look carefully enough at the story. Boek.be are a trade group in Belgium, not the Netherlands, and they seem to consist of Flemish speaking members, not Dutch. I made the mistake because I relied too much on my source. Sorry for the mistake.
This would be Amazon’s 4th local Kindle Store, and it would also give a needed boost to the local ebook market; ebooks are estimated to be about a third of a percent of total book sales in the Netherlands.
Update: There are times when i am a fool and there are times when I am a bigger fool. This is the latter. Read the comment at the end. It’s from Geert Joris and he corrects the record. Amazon did meet with Boek.be but ebooks were not discussed.
via eReaders.nl
RSS
Email
Facebook
Twitter
there is something wrong in this article because url ending with .be are located in Belgium. Dutch website ending with .nl
Thanks for pointing out my mistake.
“Boek.be are the combined trade group for publishers, importers, and booksellers in the Netherlands”
Why would a group of Dutch people go for a Belgian internet address?
And: “ebooks are estimated to be about a third of a percent of total book sales in the Netherlands.”
Only about 4% of all books are available in ebook format…
and I doubt that Amazon will be able to change that number as most larger publishers have a lot of sand around their heads…
Ok, let’s read first before submitting!
“Boek.be is de vakvereniging van het Vlaamse boekenvak – de organisatie groepeert de verschillende belangenverenigingen: de Vereniging Vlaamse Boekverkopers (VVB), de Vlaamse Uitgevers Vereniging (VUV) en Verenigde Boeken Importeurs(VBI).”
Translates as: it’s Flemish… So, the language is Dutch, the group isn’t…
Now the question is, is that 0.3% for the Netherlands or for Belgium…
Yep. I should have been more careful. Thank you for double checking.
So your source was wrong about something very basic. Doesn’t that make the whole story dubious?
No, the head of boek.be really did make that statement and my source is a Dutch blog. Naturally, they’re little biased.
The whole article is nonsense. I did not make a statement of any kind. There are no negotiations between Boek.be and Amazon. Amazon was visiting us in july tot discuss a possible membership of our organization. That’s it. E-books were not part of the discussion. I never said something about dutch books on the Kindle. Journalist imagination or wishful thinking. But not true.
And yes, we are organization of the Flemish book trade (booksellers, importers and publishers). We speak dutch and our domain extension is .be because Flanders is a part of Belgium.
In that case, sir, I formally apologize for my mistake.