Great news out of Amazon for customers in the United Kingdom. From their official announcement sent to publishers:

Hello from Amazon DTP,

We are pleased to announce the new Kindle store on amazon.co.uk. As a DTP publisher, if you have the publishing rights in the United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Isle of Man, and Jersey) you can now sell your ebooks from www.amazon.co.uk . This is great news for our DTP Publishers and our UK customers, who are now able to purchase content in GBP. If you have a US bank account configured in DTP, you will receive payment on sales in the UK store in USD. If you have selected to be paid by check, you will be paid in GBP.

We, Amazon EU S.à.r.l., will be the Amazon affiliate distributing your ebooks for sale through the UK store and are now a party to the Digital Text Platform Terms and Conditions. If you hold publishing rights in the United Kingdom for the ebooks you have listed for sale in the Amazon.com Kindle Store, you are all set!

If you have checked the Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store and do not see your titles for sale in the UK store, then please take care to ensure you have managed your publishing rights by territory:

If you’ve already published your books on the US DTP Kindle Publisher login, no problem! Opting into selling the books on the UK site as well is a very quick process:

1. Log into your DTP account at http://dtp.amazon.com.
2. In your Bookshelf, for the title you wish to update, click on Actions and select “Edit rights, royalty, and pricing.”
3. Select “Worldwide Rights – all territories” if you hold the global publishing rights for this title. Or, select “Individual Territories – select territories” if you hold the publishing rights in some, but not all UK territories (United Kingdom, Guernsey, Isle of Man, and/or Jersey).
5. Select whether you want your USD price converted to GBP, or whether you would like to set your own amount in GBP.
6. Reconfirm by checking the box that you have all rights necessary to make the content you are uploading available for marketing, distribution and sale in each territory indicated above, and that you accept DTP Terms and Conditions.

If you do not have publishing rights for your titles in the UK or for other reasons cannot sell your titles in the Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store, you must ensure you have not checked any of the following: United Kingdom, Guernsey, Isle of Man, and/or Jersey.

I’m glad they offer the option to just tie the US and UK prices together through conversion. Having to set two different prices is a pain in the butt, in my opinion.

Overall, this is great news for UK buyers and even better news for UK authors and publishers since it gives us a whole new market for our work. The process of adding the UK as a market was so easy, I’m hoping this sets the tone for future countries they add.