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As an observation, generally the rule on tax changes is, corollary to Murphy's Law:
* All tax changes result in my paying more taxes
Doesn't seem to matter if they're trying to tax the rich for the poor, or vice versa, seems I'm more out of pocket. For the purposes of progressive taxes, I'm rich, for the regressive ones, poor. U.S. books generally fall under state and local sales taxes. And given the history of us colonists, you can understand that we're not very happy with all that. Probably one of the reasons Amazon does well is that there was a quirk where web sales didn't have to collect sales taxes, somewhat still in dispute. I, of course, pay the taxes on my state income tax form, but I suppose others might not have.
I do kind of wonder about VATs, in general, don't have them here, but if a paper book is not subject to the VAT, and the eBook is, well, seems somehow wrong.
Being a reasonably good colonist, and obviously therefore all in favor of avoiding unnecessary taxes, I do wonder what the situation is on printed books that contain a CD. Do they get charged the VAT? And, if not, would eBooks then make sense if they sold you say a little one-pager "book", with a CD or something that had the actual eBook. Or then a link, like O'Reilly and a few others do, to an updated section you could download. Or some such, idea is to avoid the VAT.
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