A fran­cophile friend is eagerly try­ing to buy French books and peri­od­i­cals for her new Kin­dle DX. She splits her time between Seat­tle and France, and would love to con­sol­i­date her read­ing mate­ri­als elec­tron­i­cally for prac­ti­cal rea­sons. Fueled by opti­mism, she bought a third gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle last Fri­day.

She loves Kindle’s promise, but dis­en­chant­ment is already set­ting in… For rea­sons that aren’t clear, the usage sce­nario she has in mind is not well sup­ported by the cur­rent mar­ket envi­ron­ment. She has spent hours search­ing www​.ama​zon​.fr, to no avail. No French books to speak of, and hardly any peri­od­i­cals.

Her trial sub­scrip­tion to Le Monde has revealed a num­ber of usabil­ity issues. There’s no teaser for­mat that enables her to skip to the arti­cles that most inter­est her. No images, text only.

Update: March 14, 2012 — Ama­zon has launched the French Kin­dle Store (at last!), and now offers over 4000 French clas­sics at no charge. You can visit Ama­zon for more infor­ma­tion on what’s avail­able for French speak­ers. It will be inter­est­ing to see how long it takes the French pub­lish­ing indus­try to agree to release cur­rent titles for enjoy­ment on a Kin­dle…

And now, back to my friend’s wish list — for the expe­ri­ence she wants on a Kin­dle…

En Français, S’il Vous Plait

Her dream: read French nov­els, news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines on a con­ve­niently portable device like the Kin­dle. Cur­rent releases, not just 19th cen­tury pub­lic domain books. Because she’s pas­sion­ate about per­fect­ing her French com­pre­hen­sion and pro­nun­ci­a­tion skills, she’d love to read while lis­ten­ing to a simul­ta­ne­ous play­back via MP3 (or equiv­a­lent).

French is not her native lan­guage, so she wants to be able to select unfa­mil­iar words on the Kin­dle, thereby launch­ing a built-in dic­tio­nary whose entries explain their mean­ing. She’d also wel­come the option of view­ing French-to-Eng­lish trans­la­tions of unknown words and slang (a must-have for peo­ple whose French is less flu­ent than hers.)

She’s very inter­ested in Kindle’s text-to-speech option, espe­cially if it doesn’t sound like a robot. Need­less to say, she expects the text-to-speech option for French con­tent to pro­duce words pro­nounced cor­rectly in French, rather than lis­ten to a techno-voice try­ing to pro­nounce French words as if they had been writ­ten in Eng­lish.

Before order­ing the Kin­dle, my friend did some research which revealed that Ama­zon had released a dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­form for French lan­guage authors in Jan­u­ary. That sparked her pur­chase of a Kin­dle. Surely, she thought, there’d be French ebooks in the mar­ket­place by now, 6+ months since Ama­zon released its multi-lan­guage pub­lish­ing plat­form.

Hélas! She’s learned there are few con­tem­po­rary books in French for Kin­dle. And no linked dic­tio­nary for French con­tent as there is for Eng­lish lan­guage con­tent.

Too Early, Or Too Unusual?

Her big ques­tion: is she just suf­fer­ing early adopter pains, and if she waits patiently, will some­day have the oppor­tu­nity to read French books and mag­a­zines on a Kin­dle? Or is she an out­lier, a mem­ber of a niche mar­ket of French read­ers who would wel­come elec­tronic books, but who are too few in num­ber to moti­vate the French pub­lish­ing indus­try to embrace the new dig­i­tal for­mats?

And what about the French government’s con­tin­u­ing quest to pro­mul­gate the French lan­guage around the world? Will France suc­ceed in ensur­ing a steady demand for French lan­guage pub­li­ca­tions beyond French bor­ders? And if so, surely dig­i­tal for­mats would make French pub­li­ca­tions more eas­ily acces­si­ble to a broader global audi­ence if book­sellers could avoid the brick-and-mor­tar chal­lenges of inven­tory fore­cast­ing, ship­ping costs and other import-related chal­lenges.

Update

The Wall Street Jour­nal describes the role of the French gov­ern­ment in pro­tect­ing the rights of small inde­pen­dent book­sellers, and spec­u­lates on what’s in store for elec­tronic books (Sep­tem­ber 24, 2010 arti­cle). Will the same law that pro­tects small book­sellers against heavy dis­count­ing also apply to elec­tronic books?