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From The BookSeller: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/99...le-launch.html

UK publishers assured over territoriality following Kindle launch

Graeme Neill and Catherine Neilan

Publishers have been assured by Amazon.com that territoriality will be respected following the international launch of its Kindle e-book reader this week.

Amazon has put safeguards in place to ensure that territorial rights are respected, with more than 280,000 e-books to be made available in the UK from publishers including Hachette, HarperCollins, Atlantic, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Faber and Wiley, and with customers in more than 100 countries able to buy the device.

Publishers Association chief executive Simon Juden said: “Publishers worked very closely with Amazon.com on this issue. They have made sure consumers will buy works appropriate to the country they are in.”

Profile m.d. Andrew Franklin said: “It’s extremely important that territoriality is respected [but] Amazon’s ability to deal with territorial issues has been very encouraging.”

Amazon said a safeguard has been put in place to respect territorial rights. A spokesman added: “When a customer first buys Kindle content, they identify their region or country. In order to simplify their browsing experience, we then display the appropriate catalogue for the customer. When they travel, the content available to a customer is determined by their home country, not by the country they are travelling in.”

One notable omission from the pub*lishers which signed up was Random House. A UK spokesperson for the publisher said: “discussions with Amazon about this opportunity are ongoing, productive and private”. One well-placed source said: “Amazon felt it had enough publishers to launch the device without them. It’s a temporary impasse in negotiations.”

Macmillan and Oxford University Press were other absences. One source said that some publishers were still working to resolve territoriality issues. Another publisher not included said: “[The launch] was just as big a surprise to us as it was to you, in terms of timing. Now it’s a matter of tying up territorial issues – internal ones, like making sure we have UK pricing and UK ISBNs – and making sure their systems are improving in that area."