[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

The ability to gift Kindle books has been in place for years.

It was a USA only thing for a long time,

Most of the world lives outside the USA. People have friends & relatives in different countries. Especially Irish people?

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

This isn't really correct. There are Print Replica Kindle books, which are usually textbooks, or books with mathematical symbols etc which won't render well or correctly on small e-ink screens. They generally work on color devices with larger screens, like the Fires, or via the Kindle app on Android or iOS devices. Books with color photos, or maps, etc. also do not always look great on a small greyscale screen, again, due to the nature of the screens.

I'm not talking about textbooks or stuff that is poor on real eink Kindles. I'm talking about books found searching under Kindle and can't even be bought except for a Kindle App (the Fire is a tablet with an App). It's stupid. They need a Non-Kindle electronic document category.

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

This has nothing to do with Amazon locking you to them. It has to do with the formatting of the books, which is decided on and handled by the publisher, and is many times due to the features and content of the book itself.

I explained, or attempted to, that there is a stupid historic "rights" issue. Partly Cartel based as Publishers agreed in the 20th C. to carve up the world. Exclusivity on regional rights on physical items, DVDs, Games, BluRay, CDs, Streaming, ebooks, etc is exploitive abuse of the consumer and where the item is unavailable in some regions doubly evil. I'm opposed to "Piracy" (Copyright Violation). Such regional "divide and conquer" things are immoral except where there is a regulatory or safety reason such as mains plugs, electricity types, side of the road for driving etc. The Common Market (now the EU) was created for two main reasons, one was peace in Europe and the other was to protect consumers from such abuse.

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

I've been using Kindles since 2009, and read a variety of fiction and non-fiction, and have never run into this issue. The vast majority of Kindle books work just fine on an e-ink screen.

This is irrelevant. There are Kindle books which are only sold for Apps. I've bought them (for Android/PC app) and discovered in every case they were only text. Exporting as RTF, reformatting and recreating as Mobi / AZW3 / ePub they then work perfectly.
There are other so called "Kindle eBooks" which are only suitable for PC Screen or Tablets, not even for large colour phones. You admit earlier that text books are one example. The Kindle DX by the way was a failure, designed for education use, because text books do not work well on ANY ebook reader, even if a colour tablet. They need to be especially designed, not a copy of a paper edition. Also you need FAR better ereader software than I've ever seen. Bookmarks and Home Screen "in use books" isn't enough, never mind how abysmal annotation export is.
I've been using electronic documents since before PDFs (they started in 1990s) and ebooks since about 2005 (programs on PC and also exporting as paginated HTML with JS navigation to a 6" Personal Media Player).

Ebook readers are OK but the document management features of any ereader and even ereader apps on Tablets are dreadful.


Anyway, the OP was about how to get ebooks WITHOUT PIRACY that are unavailable in your own region. When people can't buy, some will "pirate."

I've mentioned in passing that Amazon uniquely (AFAIAK) sells things that are not real ebooks (i.e. incompatible with ANY real ebook reader, a Fire or other Tablet isn't an ebook reader, it's a Tablet with an App). This is a stupid decision on Amazon's part. Actually I suspect because eink is far more expensive than LCD, that it's only the existence of competing eink and similar readers that keeps real Kindles on the market. There is a reason why no other eink reader can read Amazon DRM kindle ebooks and Amazon doesn't sell ePub. They already sell 90% of ebooks. That's disturbing. Barnes & Noble, Kobo shop & Harlequin etc are trying to be restrictive in different stupid ways (hidden partition only, proprietary kepub, no ereaders!). Smashwords is sane.