Local sources are reporting that Amazon is in a hiring spree in Seoul, South Korea. The Korean language news site Donga reports that the retailer is hiring up to 300 positions in anticipation of a launch in March.

The jobs are mostly in IT, which is leading some to speculate that Amazon plans to launch a digital presence first and not a retail presence. This could mean that Amazon could plan to launch a local Kindle Store in South Korea in the near future.

The Kindle Store doesn’t currently support Korean, but that’s not a major stumbling block. With Amazon adding new language support willy-nilly (6 new languages added in the past 2 weeks), there’s no reason they can’t simply add Korean on the day that the Kindle.kr site goes live.

***

Speaking of which, a brief check of the Kindle has revealed that Amazon quietly added a section for Swahili some time in the past couple weeks. One hundred and two titles are listed in this section, including textbooks.

According to Wikipedia, Swahili is native to eastern Africa (think Kenya, for reference). It’s described as a lingua franca in much of Southeast Africa, with about 15 million native speakers.

Donga

image by valeuf