Originally Posted by lente
I don't know if this is the right place to vent my grievances with the way things are going with ebooks so feel free to throw this away or move it, trample it, spit on it, anything you like.
I'm a big fan of ebooks. I own a BeBook ereader for a while now and I have already enjoyed reading many books on it, but that has changed. Geographical restriction. I think most you can guess my problem from these two words. I can no longer buy the ebooks that I want, because I live in the Netherlands (yes, that's in Europe) and not in the US. I'm super pissed.
Oh I understand the reasons, but the reasons mean shit to me. I'm child of the internet age and I want my ebooks. I don't care if they come from the US, china or the moon. I used to just pirate them, yes I was a bad, bad boy, but I grew a conscience. This is costing me a lot of money, but it makes me feel better. Yet now that I am finally spending money on ebooks they begin to tighten their geographical restrictions. This isn't new, but it used to be that most books didn't have these restriction. The opposite is now true, I can no longer buy most ebooks.
Oh sure, I can still buy a lot of crappy title's. You know the cheap title's no one buys. Most ebook stores are now useless to me. The only exceptions are Bean's webscription (I love these guys, and you should too!) and Smashwords (I haven't used this one yet, but I've heard good things about it). I can no longer use my favourite ebooks stores - booksonboard, fictionwise and diesel-books -, because most of the good books from my favourite author's are now US, CA only. I know, they can't help it, it's those greedy publishers.
I can tell you I have been seriously tempted to go back to my wicked ways, but in the end I decided to remain on the path of righteousness. I will have to go back to buying paperbacks, because I don't think this will be sorted out any time soon. They will probable begin to sell more ebooks internationally, but at a higher price, just like amazon is doing now with their kindle machine and ebooks weren't that cheap to begin with. I will not pay more money for a ebook than I will for a paper version.
That's it, can think of anything else to complain about. If you have read this far: thank you for your time.
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