[ldolse]

Thanks for giving it a shot, I was going to do it yesterday but got sidetracked. I just tried it out and it worked quite nicely. I bought a gift card with my U.S. account/credit card, and then opened a new account in the process of redeeming the gift card. A credit card was never required (as long as there was sufficient store credit), but I did need to enter an address to check out - they did seem to do a GeoIP lookup and defaulted to Malaysia in the country field, but I'm not sure if that restricted me in any other way with regard to the catalog. The 50% off coupon worked great in addition to the fact that Kobo was already discounting the book - saved 8 bucks in my case.