[chamekke]

Originally Posted by januaryman

Should a book not be available for my reader-app, I click the button on Amazon, or B&N, saying I'd like the publisher to know that I would have bought that version of e-book, had it been available. Then I go off and hunt down a decent used copy of the print book I want. If there's no "very good" copy available, I'll buy new.

As no one has yet replied to amoroso's question, I'll take a crack at it.

amoroso, I see you're in Italy. I'm in Canada. I can see the "Tell the publisher!" button that januaryman mentioned, but only by employing the following ruse.

I signed out of Amazon.com, selected the Kindle Store from the drop-down menu on the homepage, selected my country/region as 'United States'...



...hunted down a book that I know isn't available even to Americans (e.g. John Crowley's Little, Big), and looked for that button. When I did it that way, I did find the button. Here's what it looks like. It's directly below the image of the front cover:



When I clicked the button, I was taken to a webpage with the following message:

Thank You
Thank you for requesting [title] by [Author] in Kindle Edition. Our goal is to make every title available for Kindle. We will pass your specific request on to the publisher.
Return to the item you were viewing or Shop in the Kindle Store

However, if I select 'Canada' from the drop-down menu -- or if I sign in under my account (which carries my country information with it) -- here's how the same page looks. No sign of the "Tell the Publisher!" button, either in its usual place or anywhere else on the page:



So, it's clear that this button is not intended for customers outside the United States. If Amazon.com doesn't detect your ISP automatically as being from Italy, and screen you that way, you may be able to select 'United States' as I did, and "vote" for a book you want as an e-book. The problem is, your vote will be interpreted as that of an American customer.

Am I annoyed? Yes. I would have clicked it at least 30 times over the last week, if I thought there was a chance they might listen. But even if a title does become available to Americans in e-book format, there is no guarantee it'll ever be available to readers outside the United States. Marilynne Robinson's luminous novel Housekeeping was published in 2004 and is available to U.S. readers... but there is no way for me, as a Canadian customer, to tell Amazon.com that I would give my eye-teeth to own an e-book copy.