Quote:
Originally Posted by Pardoz
The reason for geographic restriction's not a mystery: they exist because electronic book rights, in the vast majority of all book contracts, are an afterthought tossed into the stock contract. When electronic rights became an issue in the early 90s, boilerplate was added to standard contracts including electronic rights with paper rights. Since the standard in English-language paper publishing is to split rights trans-Atlantic (generally but not always US/Canada and UK/Commonwealth, with the odd exception like the one that made Raincoast Books a boatload of money when they realized nobody had picked up the Canadian rights to the Harry Potter books), electronic rights get split the same way.
For the current mess to be resolved, either contracts have to be changed (Magic 8-Ball says: "Outlook not so good") or the definition of 'location of sale' has to change.
In a nutshell - if I live in Poland, I fire up Opera (or Firefox or Internet Exploder), I log into Amazon-US, and I buy a paperback printed by a US publisher that only has rights to sell the book in the US, Amazon will happily sell it to me and put it in the mail. The sale is considered to have taken place in the US, in the warehouse where the book is stored. If I live in Poland, I fire up Opera (or Firefox or Internet Exploder), log into Amazon-US, and buy an electronic copy of the exact same edition of the same book from the same publisher from the Kindle store the sale is considered to have taken place...on my computer in Poland. As far as I know, there's absolutely no basis in law (and arguably very little basis in logic) for this assumption. There is, however, an argument based on brute force: "If you don't play by these rules, we (the publishers) will refuse to supply you with new product."
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You didn't get it right 100%. The same publisher (US) would love to make the extra sale! The problem is that there are other publishers around the world who have the rights for selling to different countries. The US is the biggest market in the world. Competition is fiercest and prices are the lowest. Americans love deals, people in some other countries are less price sensitive. (If you don't believe that, look at the Irex 800 mess. It was offered in the US for 400. Now it is in Europe for 600 and people are still interested in buying!). Publishers can get a lot of volume there and can negotiate for better prices for themselves, thus being able to sell cheaper. A publisher that has the rights for Central Europe, for example, let us say Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, etc., cannot expect to sell at a lot and will not have the same low cost the US publisher has. So it is really those publishers from your countries that do not want to let you buy in the US and would sue Amazon and others.
What would happen if regional restrictions were removed is that all customers who knew would buy online in the US. The market for those foreign publishers would be even smaller and the books would not get promoted in any country except the US.
A final problem is tax. US online sales have no tax. And you know how greedy European countries (in Germany I always feel that even small scale tax evasion is considered to be worse than murder) are when it comes to tax collection. In order to avoid WW III American online sales would have to set up a system of collecting and forwarding that 19% VAT to foreign governments. If you buy serious number of books online now your country may be losing out on tax money and you could actually be charged with tax evasion, have you considered that?
You could argue: "why not allow American websites to sell to customers from countries where nobody has an exclusive contractual right to sell the books in question"? That makes sense, but would be extremely complicated to carry out.
I hate these restrictions as much as the next guy. But it will take some time before this convoluted mess can be sorted out. Fortunately it is quite easy to work around these restrictions and if we all do it, falling sales in other countries will send a clear message to those responsible for the system.