Quote:
Originally Posted by markbond1007
I agree its silly but...
What I havent seen answered is the question of taxes.
I mean if a sale is considered to be the location of the buyer (and this applies to all "software" - how anyone can class an ebook as software I dont know but there you go). So ignoring the actual ability to buy (or not) certain books, by classifying the sale as happening at the location of the purchaser, that surely means that the seller is responsible for taxes in whatever country/location the purchaser happens to be in for every individual sale. For larger companies (Apple/Amazon/etc) this is fine as they just re-direct to your local site and you make the purchase there and they file their taxes etc. How do smaller businesses deal with it? and presumably if the point of sale is at the purchasers location, then the seller doesnt have to pay sale taxes for that purchase at their current location either (must be a logistical/VAT/Sales Tax nightmare)!!
Mark
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I think you've hit on the real issue here. The regional rights are a holdover from the print era, like lots of people have said. But what seems to be happening with e-book sales over the Internet is that many US sellers simply don't want to be bothered to try and figure out a way to deal with VAT and are using the regional rights as a handy umbrella excuse.
Software vendors online have managed to cope with this, but the regional rights issue just complicates things and I suspect most book sellers are just saying - oh the heck with it all, we only sell to those in our own region, where we sort of think we know how to cope with the tax stuff. The regional rights thing just becomes a convenient excuse.
It's odd because I've bought e-books from the Sony store in the US (using gift cards purchased by a friend in the US and using her address whenever asked for a "home" address), and Kobo has no problems selling to me in US$ using my US credit card with a French billing address. Waterstones sells to me on my UK credit card (with the same French billing address). Book prices in France are generally outrageous, with a law forbidding the discounting of book prices by more than 5%, so I have yet to be tempted by any e-books here in France. I don't bother with VPNs or anything fancy like that, so I assume all the book vendors know (or could easily find out) where I'm coming from.