Quote:
Originally Posted by orwell2k
Thanks for your detailed analyses of the whole rights issue - do you work for the Sony (or Amazon) legal department?... just kidding!
This is not a criticism of you, but rather the whole "rights" explanation - it seems like so much sophistry to provide an ex post facto justification of a somewhat bizarre decision. The logic seems to break down for me - by the "rights" logic you explained:
Amazon, Sony (or whichever US corporate behemouth you wish to insert here) do not have the right to set up a store-front in UK, Sweden, Australia, Timbuktu, etc. So why distinguish between paper books and eBooks in this case?
Since 1998 I have ordered books from Amazon US, but have never lived in the US. They have never refused a sale, claiming they have no "rights" to sell to me in my place of residence. This is in accordance with your from side of the equation, as I understand it - they are selling from the US a product they have the right to sell there.
So why differentiate when it comes to eBooks? Why can't I buy the "US edition" of an Amazon or Sony eBook and have it shipped to me (i.e. download it) somewhere else, just like a paper book? After all, Fictionwise or whoever, sell PDF, MOBI and LIT eBooks which are "tied" to specific readers (in principle). The argument of "bundling" books with a reader (e.g. Sony or Kindle) doesn't really make sense either.
And why, oh why, if I live in Europe can I order the 505 and Sony eBooks from Waterstones online? What happened to the whole UK rights issue there? You could argue EU rights, but last I checked Saudi Arabia and Madagascar are not part of the EU, yet they're on the list of possible address locations I can select, amongst others.
But we can go round and round dissecting the various issues - suffice to say that decisions have been made which happen to disadvantage me (and others) outside the US market. Then again, this is not an isolated incident (I can't buy an Apple dual English/Russian keyboard because I live in Western Europe, and they are only sold in Eastern Europe - go figure!).
To quote your signature: "DRM is like saying if you want to read our book, you have to wear our glasses. If you want non-DRM content vote with your dollars and buy it. No one will offer it if there's no market."
I agree regarding DRM. I think DVD regions are similarly wrong. And I feel the same way about the Sony and Amazon artificial restrictions against all those avid readers outside the US. Hence, I choose to send my hard-earned Euros elsewhere... BeBook and iRex are some choices for now...
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I'm not in anyone's legal department - I wish - but I used to manage a bookstore in Canada, so I had to deal with rights and territory issues. Now that I'm making a living as a freelance writer I have to pay attention to rights and contracts too.
The contracts they are using now are just modified versions of the ones that predate the existence of e-books, and so they carry a lot of baggage. One thing any author will tell you is that their goal is to sell as few rights as possible to any one publisher so they can sell the rights the first publisher didn't use to someone else.
I don't know the exact details of which rights are going to which country from which publisher- as this can vary on a per book basis.
In the end it all comes down to one thing - they do things the way they do not how we may want it because that's what the contracts say they can do.
(As to US/UK books in other countries - those books are generally not distributed to those foreign stores through what's called "the book trade." The stores are buying them from middlemen, not the publishers directly in the same way US and UK stores buy books from their own publishers and distributors.)