Many of the most popular Amazon Kindle e-readers in Canada have Bluetooth chips in them. This includes the 11th Generation Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition, the All-new Kindle and various Kids models. Amazon has disabled Bluetooth via software so Canadians are not able to purchase audiobooks from the Audible section of the Kindle Bookstore. In fact, there is no audiobook section in the bookstore at all, so it is impossible to buy or listen.
Audible is big in Canada and they are the most popular audiobook company. They has a dedicated Canadian landing page where they put an emphasis on Canadian authors and podcasters, however you can also listen to all of the bestselling titles from major publishers. It is possible to listen to audiobooks with the Audible app for Android and iOS. The website also allows you to listen to audiobooks with a web-player. Audiobooks are also compatible with Alexa smart speakers and also Sonos speakers. Suffice to say, Audible has no problem with selling customers digital audiobooks, just not on the Kindle e-readers.
For some reason, Audible on the Kindle is not available in Canada. Amazon has never publicly disclosed why they do not want to sell Canadians audiobooks directly on the Kindle. Amazon has an audiobook player and the option to buy and listen to audiobooks on the Kindle in the United States, Japan and the UK for example. However, they do not have a help file or a list of supported countries, where Amazon allows people audiobook access. So it is utterly impossible to even find out in advance whether Audible is supported in your country. Amazon customer service says they don’t even have an internal list of supported countries either.
Suffice to say. If you are looking to buy a Kindle e-reader in Canada and want to listen to audiobooks you cannot. If you live in other countries and want to find out in advance if your Kindle has Audible audiobook support, there is also no way to tell, unless you contact Amazon customer service and ask them, or look at the product description page and look at the reviews and see if anyone has mentioned it, which is really not intuitive.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
