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***This is ridiculous. The big publishing companies are just totally shooting themselves in the foot***
Steve, it's not often (if ever) that thee and me cross swords, but please stop laying all the blame on publishers (though I do appreciate that you stipulate *big* publishers).
As you'll see in my post above *Life* is already available in English in treebook form AT POINT-OF-SALE in France. This means there can be no publisher-imposed geographical restriction on its sale here (big house or poor house).
The problem with ebooks is that point-of-sale is everything. A French or German reader can buy a treebook from Amazon in the US because the legal point-of-sale is in the US. Ebooks are different. Legal point-of-sale is the location of the computer used for download (in my case France), so I am denied a book where the publisher of a particular ebook version does not hold European rights.
But stores are using this perfectly understandable situation as an excuse to save themselves the work of sorting out which books they can legally sell and where. Much easier for them to treat, say, Continental Europe as a bloody nuisance and just block all sales. It also means they don't have to fiddle with all the EU's various member-countries' differing Value Added Tax claims, calculate them, fiddle with prices to compensate, and then pay up.
I've come across cases where ebooks from my own house -- that holds contractual international print and digital rights -- cannot be bought in countries where the very authors of the books live and work.
It's bad enough that some publishers are facing this problem without folks putting on the agony by laying the blame clear of the front doorsteps of the darned stores themselves. Very, very often (as with Sony, Waterstones and now B&N) it's quite obvious that the stores impose these restrictions purely and simply for their own convenience.
Rant over, Steve. Rapier sheathed. Pals again?
Cheers. Neil
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