Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L
I also own many paper books which show a price in British, Australian, New Zealand and South African money, with a note saying that the book is not for sale in the USA. In many cases, there are probably separate US editions of the same books - which are presumably not for sale outside the USA. Another example of geographic restrictions for traditional books.
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Thanks for your interesting posts on this Mike.
I too have noticed the above on probably hundreds of books published in the UK.
I remember buying some paper books, which were unavailable in the UK, from the US Amazon store and having them shipped to me in the UK. Do you think Amazon have dual standards when it comes to rights? They are strict about buying from abroad with digital rights but lax when it comes to paper books. I suppose with the former they have huge amounts of money at stake and a nervous publishing industry, while the latter has not been enforced over such a long time that the publishers are confortable with it. Also shipping a paper book abroad adds a lot to the cost (probably in many cases not far off doubling the overall cost), so there is no chance that it would be cheaper to buy the paper book from abroad than in your own country. With digital sales however they need to prevent savvy buyers from taking advantage of cheaper ebooks abroad. For example The Lord of the Rings costs £12.72 in Amazon's UK Kindle store, but in Amazon's India Kindle store the same edition costs only R376.00 (rupees) which is just £3.78 - that's 3.4 times cheaper. I wonder if there is another thread "Buying Amazon.in books from the UK"...
