Quote:
Originally Posted by joehunt
This is not correct. Anyone can register and purchase ebooks from Amazon.com with a foreign address and credit card.
The books which you can purchase are subject to geo-restrictions, but hundreds of thousands of ebooks have no such restrictions. You might pay more (or less) than the US price, but the books can be purchased nonetheless by those with non-USA billing information.
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Keep in mind that just because you went to Amazon.com (from outside the US) and bought an ebook does not mean you bought the US version of the ebook from a US publisher. What versions of the ebook (UK, US) you are presented with depends on what your IP address is (which is why the VPNs come into play).
Two people from different countries (say US and UK) go to Amazon.com and look up the exact same title: even though there may be no restrictions keeping them from
purchasing the title, they're still often seeing two different versions from two different publishers. And even if it's the exact
same version of the ebook, it's not always the same publisher who has the rights to distribute the same title in different countries. So just because you went to Amazon.com and bought a title that was published in the
US by Hachette, Harper Collins, or Simon & Schuster does not automatically mean your ebook was being sold by Amazon.com on behalf of one of those publishers who settled rather than go to court in this US antitrust suit. You likely bought it through one of those publishers' other imprints (or another publisher entirely) who had a completely different contract with Amazon.