Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Kindle 3 Reads Russian

An earlier Kindle, 79 AD.

Not long ago I wrote that Kindle, Amazon's e-book reading device, doesn't read cyrillics.

With Kindle 3 this is no longer true. The newest Kindle reads Russian and other cyrillic-based languages straight from the box.

I learned this from Steven Lubman in a short discussion of the relative merits and prices of existing e-readers on Lizok's Bookshelf, an American literary blog dedicated to Russian literature (see comments to the linked post). In fact, a fellow blogger tells me he already got more than the Kindle's worth of books in Russian!

I am now dying of envy and waiting to see if the Christmas stocking might bring one to me too.

An Amazon list of Russian and Ukrainian titles is here. What a selection! 

But there is also a serious puzzlement: why 19th Century Russian classics, such as Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Chekhov,  are for sale and not offered as free downloads? They have long been available on the net for free.

Russian version of this post is here.

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