Quote:
Originally Posted by vaughnmr
For someone that's involved in the industry, it's surprising you DIDN'T think geo restrictions were a problem. This tells me the publishers don't even listen to their customers.
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I think it's not surprising that a lot of people wouldn't find this as much of an issue: the people most aware of georestrictions are expats and/or people living abroad trying to learn English and/or people who have travelled extensively and have seen first hand how it does happen that sometimes books will be published in one country but not another, or published in other countries only after some 'localization' changes (look at Harry Potter for example, and the 'Americanization' of several terms).
Personally drm is the #1 issue for me (because I do not think that "I don't care about drm, I will just 'liberate' anything I buy anyways" is a valid position) with geolocation a close #2 (living in Canada means that I don't get all the books available in the US/UK/Australia and it also means that, say, for amazon I am charged an extra $2 per title even if I do not d/load it wirelessly) and book availability in general a close #3 (why is it that so few titles are available in e-book format is beyond me, look for example at the excellent Rai Kirah series by Carol Berg, book 2/3 are available in ebook, but not 1, why?)
It seems like the twilight zone that people have to work hard at trying to find ways to purchase things legitimately, and that what they purchase is often of low quality (formatting/proofing) and inconvenient to use (due to drm and e-babel in general).
It goes to show that despite what publishers (of videogames, music, books) try to reiterate over and over, i.e. that all consumers are thieves, the vast majority of people is actually quite honest, and will go to considerable lengths to remain so (just look at all the hoops people try to jump through to get georestricted books).
It's unfortunately easier for a publisher to sound the 'it's all the fault of the pirates' clarion call any time their sales don't meet their projections rather than fix the real issues, because very few corporations care about honest customers (O'Reilly for example does, with no drm and the safari library, which is awesome) treating them like 'guilty until proven innocent' criminals and taking advantage of them whenever they can.
Personally until the drm issue is solved once and for all I will remain paper based (save my subscription to safari, of course), this way I will be sure that any book I buy will remain easily readable 5 years from now, not to mention that I will be able to buy books from amazon.com/.co.uk if I choose to, and not to mention that I will be able to check books out at the library if I want to make sure that a book is good before purchasing it.
This is unfortunate because I would love to buy a kindle and a lot of books (I read a lot, and I would easily spend $100/month in ebooks if I was able to) but what can you do.