I've been waiting for early Anne Rice books to be available for ebook, and was happy to see that a bunch of them are being released next week.
Some poking around led me to conclude that the only vampire chronicles book that would be unreleased in the US was The Vampire Armand. The Amazon ebook link, which is the same one on Random House's site, points to
a geographically restricted version not available in the US.
Thinking this is probably an error, I write to Random House at the CS address on their site. You would think they might like to know that they are losing sales, and would do something to fix it, yeah?
Here is the response I received:
"Thank you for contacting Random House and for your interest in our publications.
"This appears to be some sort of a problem on Amazon’s part. The eBook edition of “The Vampire Armand” is available in the US, ISBN 9780345464538. Barnes and Noble has it for their Nook reader at
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The.../9780345464538.
You should contact Amazon and ask that they add this title to their library for the Kindle."
(Bold added.)
Are they kidding? In what other business is it the consumer's responsibility to contact a retailer about a problem with the availability of a distributor's product? Seriously,
I should contact Amazon? Why isn't Random House contacting Amazon?
The sheer arrogance of that aside, it would, of course, not work -- I would get back the canned response that the title is geographically restricted, etc. etc. I pointed this out to Random House with the suggestion that they should be the ones to contact Amazon, and got back the response, "We appreciate your feedback and will forward your comments to the appropriate department for review."
I'm not all that reassured this is going to be fixed anytime soon.
This kind of incredibly poor response is so typical of the major publishers' arrogance when it comes to dealing with consumers in general, and concerns about ebooks in particular.