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Originally Posted by ntamas
Hi! Recently, I've just downloaded a book sample because I was going to buy it later. After a few weeks it has been deleted from the Kindle Store. When I go to the Buy Now option in Kindle Keyboard it says: I'm not entitled to buy this content. (due to copyright restrictions?!)
Why does Amazon do this? Can you buy certain ebooks from Kindle Store for only some time? Why?
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The main reasons I can think of are a) the book was being offered by someone other than the copyright holder (in other words pirated), b) the author or publisher pulled it from sale for some reason, c) Amazon temporarily pulled it due to formatting problems which they've told the author/publisher to fix (there will be a message on the books page when they do this).
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How can this be explained by copyright restrictions?  As far as I know ebooks can't have been sold out like real books.
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Copyright restrictions can mean a few things (see below), but has nothing to do with something being sold out.
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There are many ebooks being only available for customers with US billing address. Why? It's strange because it doesn't necessarily mean that the author is from the United States at all. 
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It has nothing to do with where the author is from. For self-published works it happens less frequently than traditionally published stuff, but when an author licenses their work to a publisher to sell it often limits those rights to certain geographic areas. This allows the author to license the same work(s) to local publishers in other regions as well. So the same book might have different publishers in the UK, US and Canada, etc. and those publishers are only authorized to offer the book for sale where they've contracted a licence. Sometimes an author will license to one publisher for worldwide rights, but that is still rare unless it's an older backlist title only being put out as an ebook and possible print on demand. Some authors self-publish in some markets while having contracts with a publisher in other markets.
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Even if the ebooks are available for both the Americans and the Europeans, the prices are different for the exact same ebook. WHY?!
I doubt if this could be explained by copyright restrictions again because there are no reasonable explanations on why the exact same ebook costs more for those with European billing address than for those with US billing address?
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Again a lot of times (not always) it is due to different publishers (or different regional arms of the same publisher) having the license and them pricing a book based on what they feel is right for their regional market. Cheaper for the US isn't always the case either. Sometimes a title is cheaper in the UK for example. Some markets have additional taxes added to ebooks that retailers like Amazon are required to collect on the governments behalf. Not sure if it's still the case as they were working on changing it I think, but many (all?) markets in the EU have 20% or so VAT added to ebook prices and that is included in the shown price, while US buyers sales tax is not shown in the US price.