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Originally Posted by poshm
I assume the free ebooks on Amazon.com are not available to us in the UK?
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Public domain laws vary from country to country, and it's likely the self-publishing feature on Amazon doesn't currently include international rights in its setup. And there's also just good ol' setting up international rights. E.g. Ballantine publishes "A Kiss of Shadows," which they've set at $0 for promotional purposes, but presumably that covers the US market only right now. The UK publisher may have its own preferences on how to handle promo pricing like that.
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Originally Posted by poshm
Why oh why do I feel like we get a bit of a raw deal in the UK - ie pay well over the odds for things which our US cousins get so much cheaper or indeed for nothing!
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Don't forget you folks have to pay VAT, and US sales tax rates are much lower. Then there's currency fluctuations -- e.g. I spent a week in Italy in 2008 when the dollar was low, and everything was ridiculously expensive; in turn the dollar is low again, so Europeans who shop in the US are getting great deals.
Besides, y'all don't pay for health care. If you had to shell out £50,000 for spending a week in a hospital, you might not feel like you're getting a "raw deal" all the time.
And as mentioned above, most of the books are available elsewhere, e.g. Gutenberg, Manybooks etc.