The Kindle is coming! The Kindle is coming!

Amazon.com will start selling its wireless electronic reader the Kindle in 100 countries, including China and most of Europe, from Monday, 19 October. The Kindle will cost $279 (€189) globally. Amazon says 200,000 English-language books as well as over 85 newspapers and magazines will be available on the international device.

The Kindle is popular with travellers who like the convenience of downloads and don't like carrying heavy books. Amazon says that for every 100 customers who buy a book in the US, some 48 now buy it as an e-book.

"Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed, in print or out of print, in every language, all available within 60 seconds," Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos told the Irish Times, one of the newspapers that will be available on the device. The international Kindle version will store as many as 1,500 books, read PDF files and allow users to make annotations.

Forrester Research predicts that three million e-reader devices will be sold in the US this year, up from an earlier estimate of two million. That is expected to double next year. The research group says that Amazon will take a 60 per cent market share this year, followed by Sony's Reader at 35 per cent. In July, Credit Suisse estimated that Amazon's revenues from the Kindle could reach $420 million this year, representing 8.4 per cent of the company's total income.

There are rumours that Amazon's next step will be to turn the Kindle into a device for tasks like e-mailing, texting and surfing the Web, thus competing with a tablet computer reportedly being developed by Apple.