The new global Kindle will work in 100 countries, but not in Canada

Since one benefit to the new Kindle with U.S. and International Wireless, $279, is to allow Americans to buy a Kindle that works when they leave the country, it seems natural that Canada would be among the 100 countries in which the upcoming device will work. After all, the northern neighbor to the U.S. is the second most-visited country by Americans, after Mexico—where the new device will work. Further, many Canadians are eager to buy Amazon's e-book reader, having heard a lot about it from news sources south of the border, including Consumer Reports.

Alas, Canada remains out in the Kindle cold, at least for now. While Amazon is "excited to now ship the Kindle" to most European and Asian nations and the likes of Kiribati, Rwanda, and the Seychelles, Canada joins Afghanistan and Niger as among the select places in which you can't yet buy or use the device.

Amazon does say it's "working to make Kindle available to our Canadian customers as soon as possible." Likely translation: They're continuing to negotiate with potential Canadian wireless carriers on terms for allowing Kindles to connect to their network. (All Kindles come with a lifetime connection to a wireless service included in the price, in order to download books and other content. In the U.S., Kindles connect to the Sprint network.)

Given that Canadian wireless providers use the same basic technologies as their U.S. counterparts, those talks probably have less to do with technology than with money. Canadian wireless rates are often higher than in the U.S., a gap that raised ire with Canadians when the iPhone first launched there, for example. It may be taking a while for Amazon to find a carrier north of the border whose charges they can swallow.

We'll stay on the Canada/Kindle story as it develops. In part, that's because we have a large number of Canadian subscribers, for which we provide Canadian versions of the Ratings in many product categories (available to subscribers). Plus, I'm Canadian myself—an expat who's lived in New York for the past 16 years--and I have friends up north who keep asking me about the device. —Paul Reynolds.