This is probably going to reduce the number of ebooks that are only available from US publishers (not from UK or other non-US rights holders). As I understand it, the non-US rights holders are under no obligation to produce an ebook even though they have locked in the rights. However, would you sell your next book to a publisher that screwed you out of sales because they could not be bothered to produce an ebook? Before the international Kindle you could argue the lost sales would be small, but I doubt that will be true for long now.
If I was a US publisher with lots of ebooks, I would try to work out a deal with the non-US rights holders for them to licence the existing ebooks as the basis for their versions. Amazon may already be brokering such deals, from
Wired:
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Amazon staved off copyright problems by negotiating an arrangement with English language publishers that pays royalties depending on the territory of purchase. (If you buy a copy of The Perfect Thing in London, for instance, the UK publisher Ebury press gets the sale, instead of US publisher Simon & Schuster.) Still, the rights clearances aren’t yet comprehensive; of the 350,000 books in the Kindle store, only around 200,000 will be available in some countries.
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