Amazon won’t be releasing its Kindle wireless reader in the UK in time for Christmas, thanks to the complex agreements that it must secure with European operators to ensure the gadget works.  In the US, Kindle uses whispernet, the Amazon data MVNO that uses the Sprint (NYSE: S) EVDO network to allow users to wirelessly download content. As Amazon UK MD Brian McBride told The Bookseller: “…If you need agreement with carriers in the US, there is one carrier. In Europe it is a minefield as there are so many operators. If you buy a Kindle in the UK and want to read it on the beach on holiday in Spain, unless we have signed deals in Spain it is not going to work on that beach.” McBride said he expected the device to hit the UK next year. 

Book industry executives may be reading the news with a little sigh of relief. An informal survey conducted by the organizers of Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest gathering of its kind, found that the “spectre of the digital future” has many of them worried about their fate, reports Deutche Press Agentur (via monstersandcritics.com). Twenty-five percent believe that bookstores will largely disappear in the next 50 years, supplanted by online distributors such as Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Twenty-one percent thought literary agents would not have a job as publishers would find authors online. A smaller 14 percent thought publishers were headed toward extinction, as someone still had to package and sell the content. The poll results were interesting in their extremes, perhaps divided between the luddites and the resigned: 30 percent believed digital content sales would never exceed those of paper books, yet another 40 percent said this would happen in the next 10 years. Another 12 percent thought that e-readers were a “flash in the pan” and would die out themselves like all of their earlier versions. Will we see a repeat in the book industry that we’ve seen in the music industry over digital content? Maybe not, according to responders, or maybe its wishful thinking. More than half of those polled “took comfort” in the forecast that consumers are increasingly willing to pay for “quality” online content, rather than expecting everything for free. But if this pans out, at what price are they willing to pay?

• More Titles Available For Amazon’s Kindle Despite Fears By Other Publishers
• @ D6: Jeff Bezos: Kindle Contributes 6 Percent Of Title Sales