[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

True, but in the case of Robert J. Sawyer, the same Tor books that may or may not have been geo-restricted in the Sony store (it's been awhile, and I don't remember whether I ran into that for him or another author), are available to Canadians via the Kindle and Kobo stores (the latter of which is notorious for hiding from browsing potential customers all books which are not available for their IP-determined countries).

Well, Sawyer is Canadian, and lives in Toronto. I'd be rather surprised if his books weren't available in Canada...

Also, Tor is currently his sole English-language publisher outside of the occasional special editions via Red Deer Press in Alberta and he's a pretty e-book savvy guy (owns a number of the older e-readers and writes about e-book issues fairly often on his blog), so the overlapping titles, at least, should definitely be available to Canadians.

You would think so.

As for the four promo stories from Tor.com that I mentioned, those are also freely available to Canadians via Kobo and Kindle stores again, whereas at Sony they're US-only, even though Sony also normally sells other stuff to Canada, so it seems more an issue with the vendor than the rights (and Tor.com has been effectively distributing them worldwide via their website anyway).

I suspect you're right, and Sony is simply in error. I've no idea how to get it corrected, however.

Possibly that might explain the paucity of the E-Reads titles that they carry compared to what Fictionwise still lists. Maybe Webscriptions is only selling the ones that come with unrestricted worldwide rights so that they don't end up inadvertently disappointing international readers.

If I were them, I think that's what I'd do, simply to reduce the effort required on my end. If you don't have to bother with hairy server side code to determine where the customer is based on the IP address they have, life becomes easier. You just sell them an ebook.

In any case, I just hope more publishers adopt a Baen-like model when it comes to e-books. Or more authors a Cory Doctorow-esque attitude towards e-publicity.

I've spoken to Cory about it. He has no better idea how it will all fall out than anyone else. He's experimenting. He's making a decent middle class living, which is all he really wants to do, and Tor is cooperative.
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Dennis