Quote:
Originally Posted by Buran
Then the writeup seems confusing. The US store is for US buyers with US accounts. If a book is free to those in the UK, then it should be linked to the UK store. That's not ambiguous.
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Actually, everyone uses the US store, all over the world, except those few in the UK that have moved their account to the Kindle store there (and they can move back and forth at will, paying in dollars or pounds, depending on their choice). Those who live outside the US generally pay different prices, see different availability and may pay VAT (if their country charges it on ebooks) and foreign exchange fees (when they convert their money to dollars, either with each purchase or when buying a gift certificate).
There are some free books in the US store that are for UK customers only and have been those for Australian (AU) and Canadian (CA) customers only. Most, though, tend to be US only (and since [a] I'm in the US and [b] so are most of the Kindle customers here, we generally don't bother saying that it's a US freebie when posting). For those that are non-US, I always note in the body of the text that it's restricted (as do pretty much everyone else, although not always - if someone in the UK finds a freebie, it's something of a pain to actually check for other country's prices).
The reasons I put both links in is that some choose not to change their account to the UK one (the selection is more limited, even if pricing is advantageous), while others have residences (or people on the account) in multiple countries and choose to keep their Kindle in the US side. It does affect blogs and other subscriptions if they switch back and forth, which is something of a pain. For others, they choose to use the UK store, as they can then pay in their own currency without having to pay exchange rate fees and may not have to pay VAT (taxation can be complicated, sometimes only on imports).
There will no doubt be more Kindle stores in the future. I most likely won't be able to find the deals as easily in the non-English stores, due to the use of native languages and scripts.