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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I suspect it's related to copyright issues--they had to fight to get the right to show pages online; making them easily downloadable as ePubs is going to be a big no-no for copyrighted books.
And they may not have a way to filter "books that are copyrighted in the country of the downloader," so they only have books that are PD in the USA. (The majority of these are PD everywhere, but not all--in the USA, everything before 1923 is public domain, but if the author was young in 1920, and lived another 50 years, those books aren't PD in many other countries.) And in order to stay compliant with other countries' copyright laws, they just say "this is attached to software that (supposedly) only works in the US."
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When Google announced their wider book program (PDFs on the web), they announced that about a third of the books available in the US would be available in the UK, due to differences in the copyright laws (in the UK, books enter PD 70 years after the author's death; typographical copyright also exists for 25 years, so an edition of Shakespeare, without editorial comment, would have 25 years worth of typographical copyright).
Based on the above, Google do know which books are copyright in the UK and could flag which are PD in the UK. The issue is that Sony provides zero support to its UK users, since it doesn't have a store and outsources supply and content support to Waterstones, who treat it like a science project, and where ebooks are only 20% off the retail price of hard goods. So there's no place for Google to run an analogous program for UK users, since Sony doesn't care about them enough to run its own store there.
BTW, even more gallingly, the digitisation program was supported by UK public funds, through British educational and other cultural institutions engaged (which was disproportionate, since many of the largest libraries of older English books are in Britain).
As an aside, and if anyone hasn't looked recently, a whole slew of Penguin ebooks landed in the Waterstones store on 16 March - they're not visible in the Penguin store yet, but Penguin's commitment to the program is even more lackadaisical than Waterstones'. Notably the guy running the e-reader program at Penguin blogged late last year that he doesn't use an e-reader; no surprise there.