Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
It may be bullcrap to you but quite a few local publishers depend on it to survive.
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No, it's mostly historic USA vs UK/Commonwealth English language. The problem is that the publisher(s) that have the other regions may not sign up the author at all, so book only available at all in one region.
Perhaps you are thinking of booksellers? Which in Ireland traditionally had to buy from UK Wholesale. But some grey-imported to avoid the UK-Irish markup and currency hedging and some in UK and Ireland imported magazines or books that the UK wholesale wouldn't carry. That's a separate issue to Publisher Geographic rights, which large publishers agreed between themselves in a world carve up of English Language market. A kind of cartel. USA Eveready/NCC/UC (now Energiser) and UK Ever Ready / BEREC (now gone) also did it with batteries in 1950s to 1980s.
Consumers suffer and in the case of books, authors also suffer.
Price variation in markets is based on "What the market will bear", not costs and is a completely separate issue to geographical rights, except the book may be available from more than one publisher, which can result in different prices.