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Originally Posted by Direct Ebooks
I'd agree that geographic restrictions are crazy, but we have to understand that there will be a transitionary period between traditional and "modern" publishing.
It is much more profitable currently for authors and their agents to sell their right to the highest bidder in each territory rather than to one publisher for worldwide rights. It is then up to the individual publisahers as to whether they make the books available in eBook formats.
This may not change anytime soon as the industry is so used to this model. What we may have though, is savvy authors selling the digital rights to their books to an internet based publiaher or retaining them for non-exclusive distribution themselves.
All this will take time, but we the readers can play an important part by posting on sites like this about what we want. Believe it or not, the powers that be do occassionally listen!
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The strange thing is that with "traditional" pubishing in paper form there was never a problem to order a book from a US online shop and have them send it to Europe. That's what I did before I had an eBook reader. I never had Amazon decline an order because I wanted it shipped to Europe. In the beginning I also never had a problem with eBooks. All eBooks on Mobipocket and other online shops where available world wide. Over the last couple of months more and more books are restriced to purchase by US and Canadian customers only. What's even stranger is that one eBook my be available to customers outside US at Mobipocket but not at Diesel Books for example, while with an other book ist exactly the oposite.
Publishers complain about piracy problems and create a model where a lot of books would only be available for a lot of customers in some illegal way. For instance I have not found a way to purchase "Orphan's Triumph" by Robert Buettner as an eBook. I could by the paper version from Amazon without a problem. I for myself decided that if a publisher doesn't want my as a customer for his eBook, I sure as hell will not buy the book at all.