[KarenH]

They need to charge the local sales tax in any jurisdiction where the have a physical presence - own property, have offices, warehouses, etc, and the change to the agency pricing means sales tax is now being charged based on the publishers' locations rather than the retailers'. This means that to do it properly now, in a given state some books will be taxed and others not, when purchased through the same retailer, because they come from different publishers. My thought was that maybe Sony decided to just charge a flat rate and then let the publisher(s) deal with which states get the money and how much they get. As I said before, I don't even know if this would be legal, but it would sure be a lot easier for the retailers to handle than having six (the five publishers plus their own) different sets of sales tax jurisdictions to deal with.