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Coming to this thread rather late, as I'm a noob in these parts and have a lot of catching up to do.
I'm from the UK and have no problem with American spellings, as long as it's in context - if I'm reading a book set in Britain, by a British author and he's using American idiom, I find it very irritating. It's just marketing strategy seeping into the building blocks of the story itself.
I tried an audiobook of the first Harry Potter book once, but gave up in disgust when I heard 'bangs' for 'fringe', 'sneakers' for 'trainers' and a few others. Those words are fine in an American context, but I found it very sad that children (or adult readers!) were being given such little credit by the publishers. I used to read a lot of Hardy Boys and other American fiction as a child, and part of the joy of them was the different words and usage. OK, sometimes I'd have to look words up or ask about them, but language is so important to giving a sense of time and place that it shouldn't be fiddled with just because publishers underestimate their audience.
Still not 100% sure what a 'jalopy' is though, and there were a lot of them in the Hardy Boys books...
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