Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
The British web sites do mostly try to stop me from buying their eBooks, and I honor that. This is because books are marketed separately in different countries.
I don't much like it. But I can suggest some more or less reasonable reasons. And I'll end with a totally unreasonable reason:
-- Some non-fiction books are held back from sale, typically for a few months, in a certain country, if a title on almost the same subject is doing well there.
-- eBook prices can be, and are, set higher where the locals can afford it (Australia) and lower where they can't (India).
-- Some countries (example: Germany) do not have a fair use doctrine, making it costly to publish nonfiction books quoting copyrighted materials.
-- Government censorship.
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But these conditions apply equally to paper books, and yet B&N are happy to sell me any paper book regardless of which publisher has the rights in my country (i.e. they will sell me the US Random House edition of a paper book even if HarperCollins has the New Zealand rights), but won't sell me the ebook version because I live outside US/UK.