Steve Jobs: Hot Off the Digital Presses

Steve Jobs, the authorized Walter Isaacson authored biography, officially went on sale October 24 in the US. But by the morning of October 24 in the Philippines, readers in the Philippines were already skimming through the pages of the electronic version, so to speak. The electronic version of the book was available for download on the Amazon Kindle Store ahead of the release of the physical edition. And at $16.99 (PHP 735.14) it was a steal, 51% off the cover price of $35.00 (PHP 1,514.41) for the hardbound book.

So by the time I got home from work that day, I was able to download the book and start reading it. I was expecting to have to suffer through long lines at a Fully Booked or a Powerbooks, just like the typical Harry Potter fan. But in the digital age, the only queues you have to suffer through happen if a server gets overloaded.

Amazon S3 ably hosts the world’s most highly trafficked websites, so their servers held up to the demands of millions of people trooping online to download the book and be the first on their block to read it.

I heard the book was also available on Apple’s own iBooks online bookstore, but Amazon Kindle was a better deal for me because it allows me to read the same book on a number of  mobile devices, from an iPad, to my Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab, a motely collection of Android phones, an iPod, a Windows laptop, and a MacBook Pro running OS X.

It also helps that Amazon.com accepts Philippine credit cards for Kindle downloads with no problem.

Since the book weighs in at 656 pages, the digital edition is much handier as well. (The whole book is just 4.39 MB).  I intend to be reading this over the next few days. The thought of me lugging around a fat, heavy hardcover book around to meetings and airports is not particularly appealing.

It’s only fitting that I ended up reading the Jobs biography as a neat collection of electrons on some digital device rather than a heavy mass of dead tree by-products shipped over here from a distant land.

Amazon’s Kindle Hits the Philippines

Now here’s a news graphic that made me sit up, take notice, grab my mobile, take a photo, and upload it to Twitpic. While waiting my turn at a waiting room, I was thumbing through today’s issue of the Asian Wall Street Journal and this photo of a bug-eyed Jeff Bezos of Amazon grabbed me.

The item talked about the availability of the so-called “International Kindle” in Asia, and listed a number of countries in the region.

Big surprise: The Philippines is listed. Along with other dubious “hotbeds of tech” like Bhutan, Laos, Mongolia, and Myanmar.

Not on the list are our ASEAN neighbors : Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. And while Australia makes the list, New Zealand is excluded.

Heck, in North America, Canadians won’t be able to order one.

I’m not going to scratch my head too long and worry about about Amazon’s criteria as long as I know that since I live in one of the lucky “preferred countries” and  if I really wanted one to curl up with a Kindle at the nearest Starbucks, I am now legally allowed to order it, have it shipped to my digs, and use it to download books wirelessly.

There are some questions about how Amazon’s Whispernet wireless service is going to work in the Philippines. As near as I can figure out while nosing around Amazon’s vague wireless terms of service, AT&T is their main GSM/HSDPA operator partner for this. So if you’re in the Philippines, you are going to get your 3G or 3.5G signal from an AT&T roaming partner.

I asked around if this was going to be SMART or Globe, and the answer appears to be that both are partners, so what operator you latch on to will depend on the Kindle’s druthers – unless there is a way to manually select a network.

The International Kindle goes on sale on October 19 for $279.

By the way, is it just me or does “Whispernet” sound like a lady thing?