Just send the following mail to Tor. I do not expect to get a reply from them, but at least I got some frustration of my back.
Quote:
L.S.,
I have some questions and I hope I can get a satisfactory answer to them. Let me first elaborate a little about the background, so the questions can be viewed in the correct context.
I am a big fan of books. Ever since a little boy. When I started to read, I read everything I could lay my hands on. Very quickly I found out that some genres were more on my read list than others. The genres I really love are SF and Fantasy. As I live in the Netherlands, most books are translated to dutch. This limits the availability of course, since not all books are translated. For me that is not a problem, I started to read books in the English language since I was 12 (I am 37 now). I am also a firm believer that books should be read, whenever possible, in the original language since in the translation always things are lost.
Availability of the books always were a problem. Few books were imported, so it was struggling. However, I count myself lucky that I got access to Internet quite early in the early 90's. Availability of the books became much better. Stores like Amazon really opened the world for me. I could just order away and the postman would deliver it for me, always. No issues what so ever.
Things start to change. I am a family man now and storage of the books became a problem. Fortunately things evolved and e-books came around the corner. This really seems the solution for me, all the books but no longer a lot of physical storage. Sounds ideal, right?
But now the trouble starts.... Suddenly I am no longer able to buy the books I like and love to read. This due to something called geographical restriction. All the stores which sells the e-books are telling me that they cannot sell it to me since I do not live in the US. Strange, that is no problem when I buy a physical book. If I understand correctly, it has something to do with distribution rights. Fine, I find it strange that somehow this rights do not apply to physical books. But now there is no way for me to legally buy the books that I want. I stress, no legal way.
See the problem? I want to put money in your pockets, but you deny me the possibility to. I want to buy for example the e-books from Robert Jordan (yes, I want the US version and not the crappy UK version), but you won't let me.
Here I am, wanting to spend money to buy books, with nowhere to spent it. I still want those books, so how can I get them? Any ideas from your side? Please do not tell me the answer is to retrieve the books from other places, a pirated copy via OCR for example...
Here is my plea. Stop this geographical restriction nonsense. It is not from this time and actually sets things back to before the internet days. It is archaic and drives people to piracy. Please make the books available to anyone who wants them and reasonably priced. It cannot be that a paperback costs less than an e-book. No paper, no printing, no distribution.... just a server humming in the basement.
I assume that I will hear nothing of this and that this mail will end up in the trash bin, but still I wanted to let you know. I am not alone in this, there are a lot of people who can and want to read e-books in English.
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