So, I’m back from our trip to Canada, and thought I’d do an update on how it was trying to buy e-books as an American (with American billing address, but Canadian IP address) in Canada, in case someone else wants to try the same thing some time.
I tried contacting three stores (Kobo, Amazon, and BN) before we left to get their input on how to do this, given that since e-book sale location is supposedly the purchaser’s location, it should be allowed for me to purchase Canadian-restricted e-books while I was in Canada, regardless of whether I’m American and/or have an American billing address.
Amazon simply said, not possible:
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I'm sorry to inform you that, In order to purchase Kindle content from Amazon.com Kindle store or from Canadian address, you must have a credit or debit card issued by a Canadian Bank with a Canada billing address. To accomplish this, you must set your Canadian credit or debit card as 1-Click ordering method and update your home country.
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So, I didn’t even try with them while in Canada.
BN said (after going back and forth a couple times to get beyond the pre-canned and non-applicable responses):
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When ordering NOOK Books in Canada, our system will recognize the IP address that you are using. In this case, only limited number of NOOK Books can be ordered while you are in Canada. Please check the details of the book on the website before downloading the eBooks.
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However, I found that in practice, although I could view Canadian books when I first visited the BN site while I was in Canada, I couldn’t actually buy them once I logged in, leading me to suspect that they DO look at your billing address before you purchase.
BUT, I did have success with Kobo, who had e-mailed me and said that their system would pick up my IP-address, and that if I had issues with billing address, I could just pick up a gift card at a Chapters bookstore and use that.
Like BN, Kobo did show me Canadian books when I first visited their site, but, also like BN, they disappeared and I saw American books once I logged in. By this time, I was frustrated, though, and even more frustrated when I looked for a Chapters bookstore and discovered that there weren’t any in Québec (city). So, I crossed my fingers and changed my billing address to the address of our Canadian hotel, and voilà, it worked – even though the billing address obviously didn’t even come close to matching the real billing address on my card! I find this a little scary in general
, but I was happy about it in the moment.
And, as an aside, this might have worked with the BN site too, but I never went back and tried it – my family was getting cranky with me burying my nose in my laptop too much
I ended up buying some Gladys Mitchell titles, a couple of Gail Bowen books that actually worked out to be cheaper than in the US (even with the weak US dollar, but with a Kobo coupon), and a William Deverell book that isn’t available in the US (Kill All the Judges). You can tell I like mysteries! It seemed to me that Canadian e-books are in general a bit more expensive than the US versions (ignoring exchange rate), but sometimes they were discountable in Canada and not in the US, or occasionally they were just flat out less expensive. And, I scoured the forums and found a couple of Kobo codes I hadn’t used yet, so that helped on a couple of my purchases.
I also downloaded the Josephine Tey books from the MR libraries, since I was in Canada, and they are in the public domain there.
Hopefully this will help if anyone else is in the same circumstances…