The Kindle Effect: Amazon drops e-Book downloads

For people living outside the United States, the best way to buy recently launched books is Digital downloads options provided by many online book vendors. Most of the time, Amazon used to launch the digital editions along with the paperback or hardcover editions. With the introduction of Kindle, Amazon’s e-Book reader, Amazon has dropped e-Book options for almost all books. For every book available in the Amazon store, you can either buy the paper edition or kindle edition but there is no way to purchase DRM protected digital downloads. I can’t see my previously purchased huge collection of digital editions on my ‘Digital Media’ section too.

This is very bad news for people like me, because there doesn’t seem to be any plans of launching Kindle in this part of the World. That means I have to go with other online e-Book vendors for purchasing digital books. Currently I am using Powell’s Books, who have a decent collection of digital editions.