Quote:
Originally Posted by dpierron
I couldn't agree more : imagine that I, a french citizen, with a french credit card, happen to wander in the Big Apple, NY, USA... I enter a bookstore, and purchase an american edition of a book, printed in the USA, and published by a publisher who has secured the publication rights for the USA.
Would I be allowed such a purchase ? I guess that I would, although maybe I should give proper consideration to taxes...
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You certainly would be allowed to make that purchase. The locus of the sale is the bookstore which is in the USA, so the sale of the book falls within the publishers contractual rights.
To state things even more carefully, the publisher's contract with the author/agent
restricts the location of the first sale of the book. Because of the "right of first sale" the contract between publisher and author does not and cannot place restrictions after that first sale takes place. This then raises the questions "When is a 'sale' actually a sale?" and "Once we've identified that first sale, where is the locus of the sale?"
In the US market most bookstores and distributors 'buy' books on a consignment basis. That is, they can return the books for a full refund of their (supposed) purchase price. [n.b. -- Hardcovers are literally returned, mass-market paperbacks are usually stripped of their front cover and discarded with only the front cover being returned.] Because of the right to return for a full refund, this usually does not constitute an actual sale (for purposes of determining the locus of the sale). Thus, distributors generally won't ship outside their geographic region (whether USA or North American, as the case may be). A sale from a bookstore to a person, however does satisfy the definition of a "real sale," and so establishes the locus of the sale. For retail sales from a store, (or kiosk, or whatever), that locus is the physical location of the store.
For arcane reasons that I do not understand (I am
not a lawyer!), the definition of the locus of sale for mail-order sales of physical goods such as books is not the same as the definition of the locus of sale for downloaded online content. For mail-order of physical goods, the locus of sale is the physical location of the facility that houses and ships the product. This may be a warehouse, a retail store, or the publisher's basement to name just a few possibilities. For some odd reason the locus of sale for a download is (or maybe it's just "might be"!) the location of the buyer's computer.
And it's even more complicated when you add tax questions (especially State and local sales taxes) into the picture. A taxing body local to both the seller and the buyer can collect sales tax on the sale to an end-user. But companies that do business in more than one state become 'local' in each state where they have a physical facility. Further, states attempt to collect a 'use tax' on all interstate purchases for which there is no sales tax. But use taxes are perhaps the least popular tax there is in the USA -- they are widely avoided, almost no one pays.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dpierron
What's the difference between this scenario and when I try buying a (e)book at Fictionwise ?
It could be interesting to explain this to the publishers, wouldn't it...
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What's the difference? See the above meandering description. The situation is really quite bizarre.
Xenophon