Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
And who decided to make contract that way at first, if not the publishers ?
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The authors, originally.
Mr. Author writes a book, and sells the publications rights to Kewlbooks USA Inc. Kewlbooks prints 10,000 copies and sells them; Mr. Author is happy. However, Mr. Author's book gets noticed in another country. Kewlbooks doesn't have any factories or distributors in the other country; it could make them in the US and ship them over there, but the costs would be high and profits low.
So Mr. Author talks to Megabooks UK. Megabooks would love to carry Mr. Author's book--but not if Kewlbooks is going to open a print-and-distribute factory there next month. So Mr. Author arranges the contracts such that Kewlbooks can only sell in the US, and Megabooks can sell in the UK. Maybe Megabooks distributes to Europe, and maybe he makes a third deal, with Continental Books, for that.
This works fine for print books. Customers visiting the US can buy the Kewlbooks version; they can even order it & have it shipped to them.
The problem with digital is that the "point of sale" is considered to be the *customer's* location, not the seller's location. Or rather, the location of the server the customer is identified as connected to, with a secondary check of the location of the bank issuing the credit card involved. (Not sure who decided this--don't know if it's a matter of legal precedent, author-publisher contracts, or agreement between publishers/ebookstores.)
The way to fix geo restrictions is to consider the location of the sale as "location of the servers where the bookstore resides," rather than location of the customers. (And this would mean nationally-limited stores would be selling internationally, and competing with publishers who own the rights in their countries. I'm sure the publishers' and distributors' economists would get all up in arms over the idea; I'm not sure it'd make any notable difference in actual ebook sales from the publishers' perspective--except that it'd become apparent how many customers *want* ebooks enough to deal with money conversion issues to get them.)