While it would be nice to trash every existing contract with every author
, unfortunately that isn't quite feasible at this time.
Besides, there are legit reasons for regional publishers and pricing. Different nations have different laws, different tax rates and mechanisms, different payment mechanisms, distinct marketing and PR needs, etc. Many publishers just won't have the local expertise (let alone language skills) to operate well in many foreign nations. And in many cases you probably can't charge the same amount for a book in all nations, e.g. some nations will charge a higher tax rate or some type of VAT, others may not.
Plus, I may be wrong about this, but I expect that (largely for tax reasons) if you want to do business in a specific nation, your business needs to be registered in that country -- similar to how if you want to do business in both California and Nevada, you need to file all sorts of forms and register to do business in those states.
Although it may seem like a snap to put up a website and sell internationally, I don't think it's really quite that easy in practice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cheese bogart
I'm not so sure that britain is a smaller market. I read somewhere (not that long ago) that britain and germany combined, buy more books than the USA and thats with the former still having roughly half the population.
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I'm afraid you read wrong.
Book sales in the US were around $36 billion last year, UK $3.5 billion, Germany $14 billion. It's possible they buy more books per capita though.