Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
Here is a simplistic example.
An American buys an ebook, and it costs them $7.99 USD.
An Australian buys same ebook and it costs them $12.99 USD.
Where is that $5 USD difference going? A small part only of 10% is the GST (tax).
Is the author or publisher getting more money from the Australian? That would be wrong & racist.
Or is someone else getting it? And why?
There should be transparency about this.
|
Well you're also looking at the same book put out by two different publishers, the Australian version is published by Hachette (Orbit), the US put out by Random House (Del Rey).
Ultimately as long as it's expected that a publisher will have a separate independent/semi-independent branch (with its own separate operating overhead) in various markets and as long as publishers/authors/agents insist on selling and buying the rights separately for various regions (sometimes US vs UK & Commonwealth, sometimes US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc. each separately) you're not going to get the global price equality you're after. You'd need publishers to buy global rights (like Baen does) and authors/agents to agree to the same thing. If Hachette didn't have it's own Australian branch to sustain you might get closer to the price equality you're looking for at least in eBooks (then again if they couldn't get the print cost down too you might not as I suspect they want to be careful about the disparity between print/digital cost).