Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
At least as far as taxation goes, point of sale for eBooks is where the retailer resides, not the customer. That is why Amazon can charge only 3.5% VAT when selling to UK customers, where the VAT rate is 20%, by basing themselves in Luxemburg.
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That does bring up the question of, if it's sold "from Luxemburg," how is it bought "in the UK?" Why aren't all UK (and possibly EU?) ebooks sold under the terms of "must be available to sell in Luxemburg," with no other countries' sales rights being relevant?
And, of course, that has nothing to do with the US point-of-sale, which AFAIK has not been legally established. Publishers and ebook stores have decided that the location of the sale is some odd combination of the home address of the bank associated with the buyer's credit card, the buyer's address-of-record according to that credit card, AND the buyer's current IP address, with no connection whatsoever to either the seller's business location, the location of the various servers involved, nor, of course, the actual physical location of the buyer at time of sale.