Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's not that they don't WANT you to buy their books, but that their publishing contracts do not PERMIT them to sell you some of their books. If a publisher only has a contract to sell a book in the US, then they will be in breach of contract if they sell it to you if they sell it elsewhere. That's because, legally, the "point of sale" for a digital product is the customer's location, whereas for a physical product it's the store's location. So when you buy a paper book from Amazon US, legally it's being sold in the US, but when you buy an eBook it's being sold in the UK. Yes, it's stupid, but that's the way it is at the moment, and Sony and Amazon cannot just ignore the law.
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Which is also ridiculous, especially given the fact that if that were really the case, I should be paying VAT locally, and really should be charged in my local currency. In addition to all of this the actual transaction takes place via a transfer from the ecommerce server to the payment gateway, again not my computer. Of course what it really shows is that governments/publishers/et al are just a bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't reason their way out of a teapot.
And as an (almost unrelated) example of this, did you know you cannot ring up HMRC (in the uk) put a specific instance to them (we are building a website for a company in Turkey, site hosted in the UK, client and users in Turkey, question being do we need to Charge VAT or not) and get a yes or no answer (they in fact refuse to answer, and tell you read section xyz in their hand book which doesnt actually answer the question) - useless really...
Mark