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Hi. I'm new here. I don't carry an agenda, I'm just furious about geographic restrictions.
I can buy many books right now from any local bookshop, and I'm well within my legal rights to order any book from Amazon US or US (and they will happily sell it to me), but I can't buy the equivalent ebook from a web shop here or abroad. It's patently ridiculous.
What the publishers fail to grasp, just as the music, film and tevision industries are still failing to grasp, is this: when consumers are locked out of something, especially on a basis this arbitrary and stupid, many of those consumers find ways to circumvent those restrictions, and in doing so they develop habits. These companies have had, and still have, opportunities to establish consumers' habits early by giving them free and open access to the content they sell. Instead, they go well out of their way to make things as difficult as possible for consumers who just want to buy an album, or a movie, or a book, and use it in a way that suits them.
Publishers and agents will find themselves contending with this problem for many years. It's a problem purely of their own making, and it could be very easily avoided if they simply got their act together. (Yes, I realise there are multiple levels of complexity, but as a consumer I don't want to hear excuses.)
In reference to ShellShock's post earlier in this thread, the only possible argument in favour of geographic restrictions -- and even then it's not a reasonable argument -- is localisation. I don't want to read a book by a British author with American spelling and localisation, for example. However, all that requires is a notification in the metadata of the book listing on whatever online shop is selling it, not completely locking a region out of buying it.
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