I won't argue that there are advantages to eDGe staking out a more aggressive position outside the US, but that would require some measure of additional capital to fully support it. Yet additional capital means additional risk. Since enTourage is a privately held company backed by venture capital, it's most likely the case that they feel that at this point it's not a good business decision.

You can take a gander at the management team of enTourage: http://www.entourageedge.com/about-u...y-profile.html

It seems to me that these guys have the background to know what they're doing and have a pretty solid business plan in terms of focusing on building up a network of partnerships with the education and publishing industries. Ultimately those partnerships going to be the key to enTourage's future and they require a lot of attention to properly cultivate. Since it's a different set of people at most prospective companies who are involved in the US and Europe, it makes perfect sense to me that they focus almost entirely on the US at this point. As with most things in life, when building a business it's often better to do a few things well than many things poorly.

Finally, purely my own speculation, but I suspect that the enTourage ebook store will never provide a significant revenue stream--except for possibly etextbooks. For me (grad student), almost all the material that I read on the eDGe are PDFs of academic journals, which I can download freely. I've owned the eDGe for over two months and this past weekend was the first eBook purchase that I made: ~$10 for pleasure reading, and I don't expect to be making many more purchases in the foreseeable future (not dissatisfied in any way, just broke). Now I'm just one user, but going through the "Introductions Thread" a fair number of eDGe users are academics and probably have similar usage patterns. Furthermore, there is a great deal of competition from many online retailers looking to establish a position in the ebook market, so there aren't very high margins to be realized unless enTourage somehow landed an exclusive (which I'm hoping that they can somehow do for my upcoming semester textbooks).

Your point #3 is the so-called "Gillette Razor Model": sell the base at (or even below) cost but then turn a profit on the blades. I'm not convinced that such a model is viable for the eDGe since they have to compete in a very tight market for ebook sales. In other words, the model works for Gillette because they're the only ones that can (legally) manufacture and sell blades based on their design--essentially, they control the content. Therefore, to the extent that Gillette can successfully differentiate their product from competitors, they have an opportunity earn an economic profit. But enTourage has no such analogous advantage--quite the opposite, in fact. They have limited ability to determine market price, which reduces their economic profit potential to near zero.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that I'm not sure that the profit potential from selling content is as large as one might initially think, which reduces the incentive to maximize sales volume.