Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I wonder if a concerted effort to target the author's agents would help.
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The only problem is that it's not "simply" a problem of distribution rights. There's also the whole tax issue. I suspect the reason some vendors won't sell to "foreigners" is simply because they don't want to have to bother with the sales tax/VAT issue.
In Europe, at least, this is complicated by the fact that the EU considered e-books to be, not books, but "information services" or some such designation which allows them to collect full VAT rate. In most countries, p-books get some reduced rate of VAT, or sometimes VAT exemption. But the vendors are supposed to charge the rate of VAT in the country to which they are sending the book.
I just checked a few invoices from Amazon, and yes, Amazon.co.uk does indeed charge me VAT at French rates on my purchases (books, or anything else evidently). Though oddly enough, they aren't constrained by the French laws that forbid discounting books for sale in France.
So even if the rights issue was cleared up (and I agree that for e-books, the rights should be sold by language, not by country), there is still the issue of VAT. There used to be a sort of middleman used by software companies selling their products online - where they used a middleman to handle payment for the product, including the VAT. Haven't seen that for a while, though, and most downloadable software these days seems to be handled, at least in France, through some form of locally based distributor (with appropriately elevated prices, though the distributors do provide customer service).