|
In defense of geo restrictions
The foundations of the complaints against geo restrictions are:
"Those guys over there can buy (e)books that we can't"
and
"Those guys over there can buy (e)books cheaper than we can"
Now, I will leave it to you to determine if this is a legitimate set of complaints. However, for my part it is clearly not a principled objection, rather one based on convenience and a demand for price parity (regardless of any local conditions).
For instance, as the OP tried to express: Geo restrictions basically come from the publishers' contracts with the authors. Few of those who complain consider, let alone try to figure out, what the author is entitled to, or how poorly it would be received if the publishers and/or retailers openly violated the contracts.
Similarly, the consequences of relocating the point of sale for Internet commerce to the retailer's location (as opposed to the buyer's location) is seldom explored -- and in at least some cases, is likely to have negative consequences. For example, under that schema, the nation you reside in will almost certainly lose sales tax / VAT revenues on a large chunk of sales. Your local retailers will suffer, because either they will lose business or will have to operate on razor-thin margins in order to compete with retailers around the world. Retailers would quickly migrate their sales locations to whatever nation(s) are willing to eschew taxes in exchange for the privilege of hosting a few server farms.
Also, if you're buying internationally and the price is based on the seller's nation, the prices you pay will change daily along with currency conversion rates -- and it's entirely possible that the price of a book could increase significantly in a short period of time, and the foreign retailer is not inclined to change its prices on your behalf.
For example: At the moment, the Australian and American dollar are close to equal. However, the AUD exchange rate was once closer to 1.9 AUD per USD, and could easily return to such figures. As a result, if we got rid of any tariffs, VAT or additional fees and allowed Australians free access to US ebook retailers: an ebook that costs USD $10 could cost AUD $10 today, AUD $12 next year, AUD $15 the following year and AUD $19 six months later. This is hardly a setup that can indefinitely guarantee price parity.
Meanwhile, there are actual advantages to everyone to allocating rights to different local publishers. The local publishers will know the local market, the local media, the local taxes, and will have a greater incentive to translate and sell works. An American company is not going to have a big incentive to translate a work into 50 languages and hire employees in 70 different nations; it's just inefficient. Just because you can sell an English version of a book from a single server in Oregon doesn't mean that is the best approach.
And, of course, it's a setup that respects the existing contracts between publishers and authors.
In other words, there is no simple and painless fix.
Fortunately, though, there is a fix, at least for the first problem: Time.
As ebook markets pick up speed, local publishers will have greater incentives to put out more and more titles. Thus, eventually the "availability" problem will be mostly relieved.
I don't think there will be true price parity any time soon. However, none of the suggestions by irate punters would result in permanent price parity anyway. Thus, "let us buy American goods!" rather than develop better prices and services in a local market is, at best, a chimera that is only shiny for as long as the USD is weak...
|