Quote:
Originally Posted by karenr_nz
Thanks Tyson. Here's hoping that things come our way. We have both Borders and Dymocks in NZ (destroying the local booksellers but there's another story) so it should be a possibility. But the problems are still selection and price ... Many titles are simply not available down this way (geo restrictions) and I don't quite see why I should pay more for an Australian edition of an ebook than a US version ...
(By the way, many of us here in NZ do have broadband ... Some of us even have cable broadband!)
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Yeah. That was more a reference to the fact that Australians are around the highest per capita downloaders of tv shows, and if we thought Telstra was bad, we should have your telco. Kiwis would beat us here probably, if they had the opportunity having our bandwidth limits. Lots of NZ plans are only a few GB a month, aren't they?
No, very few of us see why we should pay more for exactly the same thing, you are right, there.
In Australia we will have to pay GST - but you should not, on Australian books? So booksellers here will be at a competitive disadvantage from Amazon (as are the poms with their nutty VAT rates).
Now bandwidth, server hosting, etc., is a bit more expensive here, and real estate is maybe a lot more. So we'd expect higher prices perhaps, but not on the order of double.
So presumably there is some sort of middleman in there. E.g. the local publisher. Who just happen to be 100% superfluous when talking about digital books from another country, from the reader point of view.