Amazon Kindle pricing in Germany needs explaining

The German Kindle blog is happy to announce the first Kindle with German menu (the version without keyboard or touch).

I commented on the blog post and almost wrote my own rant here, as to why the German version was so darn expensive. I should have stayed in Google Reader to come along Marco’s post, who linked to an article by TheNextWeb about the misleading pricing. Ahh, there was my mistake.

The US prices you might have seen are all ad-supported, the so called “Special Offers”. The ad-free versions cost between $30-40 more. The first model in Germany is an ad-free one. There is, to date, no ad-supported version of the Kindle.

So, German buyers are NOT once again ripped off. The problem is the baseline. If Amazon had given the ad-free prices as the official prices in the U.S. there would be no room for confusion. It is also saying a lot about where Amazon wants the Kindle to go. It might become a platform which nurtures impulse buying via “Special Offers”.

Long story short: the €99 Kindle in Germany is actually the $109 Kindle in the U.S.