Thread: What's the point of Geographic restrictions from a publisher's perspective?
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Old 02-11-2010, 04:36 PM   #13
fugazied
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L View Post
There's also a certain amount of historical baggage lying around. This dates back to the days when publishers operated in a single country or region, and it was physically difficult for them to distribute books in other parts of the world.
Yup that's it as I understand it. The publishers got into the habit of licensing the books to various publishing houses in all the different countries/regions. Now when a book is released and the little publishing house in say... Australia (Penguin Australia) for example gets the rights to print copies of a book, they sell it in Australia and no one else can.

They don't want ebook sales canibalising their print sales for the region. Different countries also have different rules in regards to book imports I believe. So countries like Australia cannot import super cheap books printed by publishers in Indonesia when there is an Australian publisher making the same book. So not only does the regional publisher want to stop the books coming in, some governments don't want books from other regions coming in because it crushes local publishing houses (protectionism and anti-globalisation at work in the publishing sector). Just another factor to make licensing books and publishing more confusing.

Recently in Australia they wanted to open up the book market to allow cheaper foreign imports - the supermarkets wanted it, but the authors and publishers didn't. It meant they would lose their regional monopolies and also for authors, it meant less money per book I believe. They might get 50 cents for a book print in Indonesia under an asian publishing house and imported into Australia, while an Australian group would give them $1.50 per book (yes it's that low). It's a problem facing e-books.
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