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Originally Posted by DaronFraley
Don't publishers or agents sell publication and distribution rights to a publishing house in the other country so that they can avoid the huge expense of shipping across borders and yet still make some money on the deal?
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Nope.
Printing and shipping is a small slice of costs. Lots of books are printed in cheap labor markets (e.g. China) anyway, and shipped to another location.
"Local printing" might have been a bigger reason 20 or 30 years ago, but even then the real driving issue was "local marketing" and managing local business issues.
For example, if I am a Canadian author, chances are neither me nor my publisher is capable of: Prepping a German translation, finding good German distributors, finding good German press outlets to talk to, schmoozing the right people, paying all the appropriate local taxes and fees, and of course collecting payments. It's much, much harder to perform these critical tasks (especially collecting on delinquent payments) if you aren't in Germany and don't speak German.
And, like it or not, there is often a preference for local businesses, both on the part of the citizens and the government. Some nations (China and India in particular) won't let you do business at all unless you partner with a local company or distributor.
Now, multiply this effort against, oh, 20 nations, and you'll see how even the largest publishers are unlikely to have these capabilities.
If you're a small author and have little intention of selling internationally, then it probably make sense to sign over international rights to one publisher. But for those authors who do hope to get their work sold abroad, that is not going to cut it, especially if the publisher is small.
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Originally Posted by DaronFaley
Therefore, doesn't it make more sense for ebook rights to be split up by language?
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Retailers perhaps. Rights, not really. Like it or not, the Internet simply has not obliterated all national or regional concerns and borders.
Even then, I'm not sure everyone would really be happy if, for example, Amazon turned into the One Ebook Retailer to unite them all and in the dollar bind them.
Meanwhile, the expat market is not exactly huge. For example, Germany has one of the largest expat populations; there may be 3 million German expats, out of a population of 81m; that's about 3.7%. Japan has around 750,000 expats out of 127m, or about 0.6%.
So, carving out something for the few markets with lots of expats (UK, Germany, Italy) might make sense. Everyone else will probably run into diminishing returns.
Eventually this will get worked out. This, of course, requires patience and the abandonment of a massive sense of entitlement by the people who insist on investing in technologies before the products even make it to market.
But the reality is that making these kinds of changes simply do not happen overnight -- and that often, it's better to let a solution grow slowly and gradually rather than give in to the demands of a handful of early adopters.