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Commercial ebook stores were required to begin honoring territorial licensing restrictions starting in 2009. They weren't able to say "Oh, but we're on the Internet in the USA, we can sell to anyone as if they're in the USA, just like Amazon can ship paper books from the USA to anywhere in the world." With the Internet, it was ruled that the "location" where someone bought the ebook was considered to be where the computer that bought it was, whereas for dead trees, the location was the warehouse the paper book shipped from.
Even though the methods of territorial restriction on the Internet are rather leaky (as the existence of all those VPNs for Netflix proves, and as PG argued unsuccessfully before the German court), that doesn't excuse the ebook site from trying.
And that cuts both ways; the other day I saw a news story in which a suit by the owners of The Cosby Show against a British documentary on the downfall of Bill Cosby for using footage from it was thrown out of a US court because the documentary had never been made legally available in the US, so the suit would need to be filed in the UK. The Cosby Show people tried to argue that it could still be viewed here due to VPNs, but the court found that wasn't enough for an American court to have jurisdiction.
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