Kindle Digital Services announced today the extension of the 70 Percent Royalty Option to books sold to Canadian customers from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, Windows Phones and Android-based devices.

With this program, authors and publishers around the world can receive a 70 percent royalty, minus delivery costs, on the sale of their book to Canadian customers. This strategy proved to be profitable in the US and UK markets and this extended to the Canadian market.

They also announced that the Kindle Digital Text Platform has changed its name to Kindle Direct Publishing and invites publishers to self-publish books in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

Amazon focuses its attention to Kindle as a platform and the changing of the name is a smart move. According to Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content  “We’ve also changed the name of our service from Kindle Digital Text Platform to Kindle Direct Publishing, which we think highlights its mission: offering authors and publishers a fast and easy service to sell books on Kindle worldwide.”

The Kindle apps developed in 2010 helped increase the product’s popularity, such as books for loan or periodicals covering The New York Times, Newsweek etc, the total number of downloaded books and periodicals going up to 750,000 million. Amazon’s efforts are also taking into consideration competitors services such as Google’s eBooks and eBookstore. Kindle Direct Publishing is set to be huge, and tapping into the long tail of self-publishing is keeping Amazon far ahead of the curve on digital publishing, marketing and distribution.