With the launch of Amazon India I find myself wondering about the morality of circumventing geographical restrictions only to save money. With ebooks there's no shipping costs involved, so it'd be an easy thing to do and I wouldn't notice the difference in the end product. I'm personally perfectly fine with circumventing geographical restrictions to get access to an ebook that's not for sale in my location, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing it to get a better price.
On the one hand, it's still buying the book from a legal seller and the only thing that's making it a gray area is where I'm physically located. On the other hand, I'm denying authors some of their profits.
To illustrate what I'm talking about, the Kindle ebook for Margaret Atwood's latest,
Maddaddam, is $17.49 on Amazon.com and $9.98 on Amazon.in, so if I were to buy this via Amazon India I'd effectively deny Atwood approximately 50% of her royalties on that sale. I say approximately 50% because the list price show an even bigger difference, and I think authors probably earn their royalties on that price.
In addition to the authors, I'm obviously also denying publishers some profit and possibly Amazon as well, although I'm less sure about the latter.
So yeah... thoughts?
[image: Pen Waggener via Flickr]