Quote:
Originally Posted by thinkpadx
How does an author benefit when I'm not able to buy a book due to geo-restrictions?
This has been talked over before here at MR and a more sensible logic would in this case be to give rights per language not per country.
|
This scenario could actually work, but not in all cases.
If the author doesn't care about foreign sales, then it can make sense to assign international English ebook rights to one publisher. After that, it's up to the retailers to decide where they want to sell the ebooks.
However, this still leaves numerous issues on the retail level. For example, even clearing out the need of a foreign entity to have an Indian distributor, the retailer still has to deal with currency issues, sales taxes and international credit card processing. There can be all sorts of cultural and legal implications -- e.g. what happens to a retailer that sells an ebook of Salmon Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses in Saudi Arabia?
These aren't deal-killers, but do raise the costs of doing business. We will likely need to wait until the international ebook market grows for anyone other than Amazon to really dig into this type of offering, and even then they may need to carefully supervise content for regional issues.
And to be a bit more explicit: One other reason why the authors benefit is because it's an indication that the publishers are actually abiding by their contracts. The only way this issue could truly be solved overnight would be for the publishers to violate the existing contracts
en masse, and authorize international ebook sales without the author's permission. I don't see how the authors benefit from that kind of approach.