Quote:
Originally Posted by fugazied
I don't really understand the extra fee, is it a kickback for publisher? Some kind of carrot to entice publishers to allow international sales despite piracy/licensing misgivings?
It was one of the disappointments for my international friends who ordered one.
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It's nothing to do with publishers. If a US user travels abroad with his International Kindle, he will pay $2 for each book downloaded via Whispernet while in another country. And this for both new buys and downloads of books that were bought before but later deleted from the kindle. Each download costs $2. This is to cover costs with the wireless networking, which is higher in most countries than in the US.
Obviously, what Amazon did was embed the $2 dollar fee in the price of international purchases. One difference though: when I buy a book I pay 2 dollars more than if I bought it in the US, but then I can download this book from the Amazon servers how many times I want. So while a US user on roam has to pay for each download, I just pay $2 once for each book.
For public domain books I try to get them from free sources anyway, and many books posted here in mobileread and other sites are actually better formatted for the kindle than the "free" (to me $2) books that Amazon offers.
Of course I'd prefer to not have to pay more, but most e-books have prices in the same range as the paper book, or somewhat cheaper, and in the case of the p-book I'd have to pay at least 5-6 dollars on shipping (if I order more than 4 or 5 books at a time; for just one book I'd pay around 12 dollars on the cheapest shipping option). So overall it is a good deal, I think.