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As I understand it, publishing rights are divided by region. Using English-language areas as an example, the Australian region is separate to the UK region is separate to the North American region. Not sure if North America is a single region or whether that's broken up into US/Canada. Likewise Aust/NZ/Pacific. I have no idea whether the same applies for other languages.
Australia has protectionist publishing policies preventing parallel imports. This is highly unlikely to change any time soon since a review just last year was ignored after a successful PR campaign by the publishing lobby. However this did not stop people in Australia from purchasing print books from a publisher or retailer overseas and importing directly, it was just retailers in Australia who couldn't. However the difference with ebooks is that while the point of sale for print was deemed to be the location of the seller, the POS for digital is deemed to be the location of the buyer. Hence Australians not being able to buy many ebooks.
I agree that worldwide language rights for digital editions makes sense, however the publishing industry is still working out how to deal with digital formats and is more worried about DRM than geo-restrictions. At the moment they just see digital as another format like HC, TPB and MMPB, and the rights are packaged accordingly. I think in future we will start to see worldwide digital rights as separate to print rights, however most recent books will still be covered under regional contracts. The push may need to come from authors and their agents.
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