I'm posting this in the hopes that other people who live outside Western Europe / North America have run into this problem as well. I'm in
Romania, Eastern Europe and as of right now, I can no longer buy
anything on the Kobo e-book store.
The store used to work without a problem on my end. Just a few weeks ago I was able to add several dozen books to my wishlist and successfully pre-ordered
"When Sorrows Come" (the 15th book in the October Daye series). Now? Every single book gives me the following error, where the
'add to cart/add to wishlist' buttons should be:
Unavailable in Romania
This item can't be purchased in Romania. See Other Editions
Clicking on
'see other editions' does nothing.
I've randomly clicked on over a hundred books in the store, in the last few hours, exact same result. What's interesting is that the books in my wishlist apparently
can be bought, if I click on
'add to cart' within the wishlist itself (if I go to the book's store page, I get the
'unavailable' message). So I'm stuck with the only purchasable books in the whole damn store being the ones I'd already added to my wishlist before this shitshow.
I asked other European friends to check if they can buy books from the Kobo store and a friend from
Poland confirmed that they're getting the same kind of
'unavailable' message on every single book as well. I then tested with a proxy -- the books show up as available for purchase with a proxy set to the
US, UK, Germany and the
Netherlands. The
'unavailable' error comes back with a
Czech Republic proxy.
Support has been rather hopeless so far. Just "clear your browser cookies" (already done, problem persists), "try incognito mode" (already done, problem persists), "try a different browser" (already done, problem persists), etc. In the end, the only thing I got was a promise that the issue would be escalated higher, no explanation as to what on earth is happening.
The kicker? I bought a brand-new Kobo Clara HD just last month and was excited to start getting books for it, when I had a bit more money available. Now I'm just crushed and angry at the very real possibility that Kobo might've kicked Eastern Europe (and who knows how many other non-Western countries) to the curb.