Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Let me put it bluntly. Its damn easy to buy an ebook
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In my experience, it's often damn tricky.
First you have to do your research on formats, so you don't accidentally buy from a shop that'll leave you with a book you can't read on your device. (splits mostly down to "amazon" vs "everybody else", but it's still something you need to know about beforehand, or you run into problems.)
Then you need to find a shop that will actually sell a compatible format to you, rather than - probably after you signed up, picked a book or three and try to check out - telling you you are in the wrong country to buy. (You probably also need a credit card, which most people I know don't. I got one specifically for international orders.)
At least those things need to be done only once.
Repeat for each book I hear about and want to buy:
Hope that the book is available digitally at all.
Hope that the book is available in one of the few shops that sell to me.
Hope that the individual book is not georestricted.
If you're lucky, maybe a book is georestricted, but does show up in a shop that doesn't check your location too carefully, so you can buy it with a forwarding address in the USA.
I saw a few days ago that a new book my Jonathan Stroud is out. I haven't found it anywhere but at Amazon and Waterstones. My ereader doesn't understand Amazon format, and while I probably could strip the DRM and convert the book (which AFAIK is illegal, too), I don't want to give them money because of their format policies. Waterstones won't let me buy the epub because I'm not in the UK.
I've written to the author, and hope it's just a matter of it taking a little time before the epub file will be available on Kobo or bookdepository - since Amazon would sell it to me, it's apparently not a matter of the contracts prohibiting selling it to someone in Germany.
I didn't keep an exact tally, but I think of the books I wanted to buy from traditional publishing houses about one in eight I could not buy due to regional restrictions of some kind.