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In a sensible and unsurprising mood Amazon today not only dropped the price in the US for their Kindle Ebook reader, but massively extended the reach of their pioneering device (and thusly of Amazon’s Ebook sales) by announcing a global edition of the 6 inch money spinner.

The base Kindle, now called the “Kindle US Wireless” is available for 40 dollars less and will still only be able to download content in the US, so don’t count on it for your hometown newspaper while on that world tour you were planning.

As of today however you can preorder a Kindle 2 in over a hundred countries (in fact pretty much all of them save for those in the Middle East, boo hiss) for delivery in a couple weeks. The device will be able to download books and magazines all over the place (including the US) via AT&T and their roaming partners (considering AT&T’s Network problems in the US, this could be asking for trouble, but who knows).

Here is a bit of what Amazon has to say in their Press Release…

The Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore) offers international customers over 200,000 English-language books, including New Releases and New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically priced less than physical editions.  Over 1,000 different rights-holders now have books available in the Kindle Store, including leading publishers Atlantic Books, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Faber and Faber, Hachette, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Penguin, Profile Books, Quercus, Simon & Schuster and Wiley.

Considering the number of strong competitors that have surfaced for the Kindle such as the Sony Reader (as well as international options like the iRex) it is not surprising that Amazon rushed to release a more global version of the device. Since according to Amazon, when a book also has a Kindle version available the dead tree/ebook sales split about 50/50, there is just too much money to be made to concede the international market to other brands. It will be interesting to see how well the Kindle does in places like the UK, where they are coming to the table a bit late and more tied to a specific vendor then their rivals. It will be an interesting test of the new EPUB open standard that Google and now Sony is pushing. Will it stand up to Amazon’s marketing muscle or will readers choose a more proprietary reader with a big reputation. Is the Kindle an international status symbol? We shall see.