Quote:
Originally Posted by Arek_W
there are no import duties from the US to EU, untill declared value is over 37 USD/per piece excluding freight. So, I do buy a book on Amazon US, ship it over, dont pay an import fee nor local VAT. done. You see, there is no logic.
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You are mistaken. (About the lack of logic, that is.) It makes perfect sense if you go back 80 years and look at how the publishing industry acquired its current shape ...
English language rights to a book are traditionally sold in two tranches, based on geographical location: US/Canada is one tranche, and UK/commonwealth (excluding Canada) is the other. This system goes back to the early 20th century and was necessitated by the pre-Berne convention US copyright law, which didn't recognize copyright on works not actually copyrighted
in the USA and led to rampant piracy (such as, for example, the first US edition of "Lord of the Rings" -- published in the USA without permission). The publication in different zones can actually be beneficial to authors, but can lead to books being sold to different publishers in different regions. A personal example: the right to publish my science fiction novels are sold in the US/Canada zone to Ace (an imprint of Berkley publishing group, which in turn is a subsidiary of Penguin), but in the UK/commonwealth zone to Orbit (a subsidiary of Little, Brown, aka Hachette Group). Orbit and Ace are actually rivals, and imports in substantial numbers of one edition into the other publisher's territory would be detrimental to their sales (and, by extension, to my future book advances, as the author).
In recent years it has become more common to sell world English language rights, but even so, publishers in one zone tend to sub-license the right to publish the works to a publisher in the other zone. (Personal example: my "Merchant Princes" books -- world rights are sold to Tor in the US, but Tor then sell publication rights for the UK/commonwealth zone to PanMacmillan in the UK -- who, confusingly, then publish them under the Tor imprint.)
Which brings us back to Sony.
The reason the Sony ebook store is only accessible using a US credit card is that Sony is sourcing books from US publishers and is constrained by their right to publish in that territory. They're bending over backwards to avoid any risk of being sued by a publisher for selling in the wrong territory. (In practice, in the publishing world, the risk of this happening is close to zero; all Sony really need is a checkbox on the storefront saying "I am somewhere in North America" and they've probably exercised due diligence. But Sony's approach to intellectual property rights comes from the film, TV, and music side of the field, so ...)
I expect that when Sony set up to sell the Reader in Europe, they will be publishing different editions of the ebooks and will not take American credit cards for purchases in the European ebook storefronts.