Geographic restrictions - a different perspective

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

For example: At the moment, the Australian and American dollar are close to equal. However, the AUD exchange rate was once closer to 1.9 AUD per USD, and could easily return to such figures. As a result, if we got rid of any tariffs, VAT or additional fees and allowed Australians free access to US ebook retailers: an ebook that costs USD $10 could cost AUD $10 today, AUD $12 next year, AUD $15 the following year and AUD $19 six months later. This is hardly a setup that can indefinitely guarantee price parity.

Price parity means charging people the same US10 whereever you are - doesn't have anything to do with exchange rates. Yes, the dollar has climbed - and when it goes down dead tree books jump significantly. Back from the time you state some mass market paperbacks went up to $24. They have only recently started to get a bit cheaper, years later, because of competition and discoverability. If that is because of a UK tax haven, then good! Because the UK companies have been getting plenty of free money from Australia for a long, long time. They would keep pocketing a bigger chunk of now-parity exchange rate purchasing of their books. Books would jump in price within weeks and never come back down in price when the exchange rate went the other way.

Local retailers here would much prefer the product to be cheaper and more competitive, so they can stay in business.

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

The local publishers will know the local market, the local media, the local taxes, and will have a greater incentive to translate and sell works.

However, the people who live in a country that is a tiny market (say, one million people) will never have local access to most books - not even most international bestsellers, as the market just cannot bear it. It doesn't matter how much incentive there will be - the local publishers in small markets simply won't be able to translate and publish even a tiny fraction of all books some of their readers might be interested in. For all other books, the authors will lose out.

And in addition, plenty of people even in countries with big local markets don't have any interest in buying and reading translations. If I am able to read a book in the original language, I'm not going to read the translation, and I'm not alone in this. (I'm not putting down translations. I'm a translator by occupation, and I've translated a handful of books among other things. The result, no matter how good, isn't comparable to reading the book in the language it was written in, in the author's own words.)

Keeping the native-English-language markets split makes a certain sense (although I'm quite sure that people in those markets are no less irritated for not having access to books none of their local publishers have bought). Selling translation rights to not-English-language markets certainly makes sense. But keeping international rights for the original (I use English as the example, as that's the current prevalent language in the ebook world) and refusing to sell English ebooks globally (outside the separate English-language markets) is just the author and/or publisher excluding potential customers and giving up income.

Which is their prerogative, of course. But as someone in a very small not-English-language market who reads books in English almost exclusively, it's my prerogative to be irritated by people not wanting my money when I'm willing to pay them, and by having to jump through hoops and break rules and pretend I'm American just to be able to buy a book.

Yes, there is a certain sense of entitlement involved, I admit - if all my friends are allowed to read a book, and talk about it, and praise it, then it feels rather depressing to not be allowed to read it because I happened to be born in another country - but even with that, I still think it would also be in the authors' interest if people like me were allowed to give them our money.

As for local taxes, Amazon UK charges me my local VAT (not UK VAT) for physical goods they sell me, so having the point of sales being the seller's location seems to be an issue that can be resolved.

(I suppose there is the theoretical danger of local publishers not wanting to buy the translation rights if their local population has access to the original, but in my experience, most people in any country don't have language skills good enough to read in a foreign language without too much effort, so that danger should for the time being still be not too great.)

Of course my arguments stem from my convenience, but I'd really like to know how excluding a large number of potential customers like me is in anyone's interest, least of all the author's.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

"Those guys over there can buy (e)books that we can't"
and
"Those guys over there can buy (e)books cheaper than we can"

Now, I will leave it to you to determine if this is a legitimate set of complaints.

In this day and age? By any and all means. Globalization is not a one-way street you know, i.e. for the manufactures to profit from offshore costs and salaries and home prices. The internet in particular is a great leveler here, allowing you to check prices in other parts of the world in an instant.

Few of those who complain consider, let alone try to figure out, what the author is entitled to, or how poorly it would be received if the publishers and/or retailers openly violated the contracts.

That's because customers and consumers don't (and really don't have to) give an, uh, airborne fornication, if you catch my drift: they see the results, the unavailability, the price difference and are pissed. End of story.

Your local retailers will suffer, because either they will lose business or will have to operate on razor-thin margins in order to compete with retailers around the world.

Yeah, because I would instantly start ordering my groceries from Kuala Lumpur just for the novelty of it.

For example: At the moment, the Australian and American dollar are close to equal. However, the AUD exchange rate was once closer to 1.9 AUD per USD, and could easily return to such figures. As a result, if we got rid of any tariffs, VAT or additional fees and allowed Australians free access to US ebook retailers: an ebook that costs USD $10 could cost AUD $10 today, AUD $12 next year, AUD $15 the following year and AUD $19 six months later. This is hardly a setup that can indefinitely guarantee price parity.

What are you talking about? Of course the seller sets the price, in USD in this case. Any currency fluctuations would be borne by the buyer, obviously. For the seller this wouldn't matter one bit, he'd get the asking price and be done with it. It's just that they don't even want to (aren't allowed to, whatever) do business with 'em foreigners.

The local publishers will know the local market, the local media, the local taxes, and will have a greater incentive to translate and sell works.

You don't get it, do you? I don't want a translation. I want the exact same product they're selling in the US, only they won't sell it to me and no European publisher shows an interest in bringing the book over here because there are too few people like me. So it's a lose/lose proposition, really.

Just because you can sell an English version of a book from a single server in Oregon doesn't mean that is the best approach.

Yes it is, when that's the book (some) people want. I don't want to read it in German, or French, five years hence. I want it in English, and I want it now. And I'm prepared to pay for it, but (local sales tax and such notwithstanding) not obscenely more than people in the US.

... none of the suggestions ... would result in permanent price parity anyway.

Nobody demands such a thing, just that a global product has a (more or less) global price. A "just" price, if you will. Currency fluctuations (which work both ways, by the way) will obviously have to be borne by the buyer.

Thus, "let us buy American goods!" rather than develop better prices and services in a local market is, at best, a chimera that is only shiny for as long as the USD is weak...

Do tell? Currently it's the other way round, at least where the Euro is concerned.

Bottom line: Geo restrictions are silly if only because they prevent people from buying what they actually want to buy.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Technically, it is against the publishers' contracts to sell a book out of their agreed geo area but practically being near unenforceable and almost completely ignored... unfortunately for eBooks, it is relatively straightforward to trace buying point and block automatically...

I do not believe it is against anybody's contract that e.g. Amazon sell me US paper books (I am in Sweden). And I doubt very much that UK publisher cannot sell to Swedish bookshops according to the contract.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by tompe

I do not believe it is against anybody's contract that e.g. Amazon sell me US paper books (I am in Sweden). And I doubt very much that UK publisher cannot sell to Swedish bookshops according to the contract.

Fine, you're the expert... 15-20 years of buying/selling books, doing web work and running B&M plus web sales are obviously trumped by your expertise... I really wonder why anyone actually bothers trying to make a factual point on here any more with so many "experts" who reckon "thinking" & "believing" is better than knowledge... enjoy where your head is...

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by tompe

I do not believe it is against anybody's contract that e.g. Amazon sell me US paper books (I am in Sweden).

You are not buying from a publisher, you are buying from a bookstore.

[calibrated]

The problem with geographic restrictions, as is true of DRM generally, is that they penalize honest readers but do nothing to stop piracy. Once something has been digitized, there's really no way to guarantee that it won't get out on the web, and there is no technological solution that doesn't break the Internet (which is what the whole SOPA row in the US is about).

As an example, I recently was looking for a particular book that is not yet available in my country in either print or electronic form. I could order a paper copy from overseas and wait a week or two to get it, but the e-book version was completely unavailable to me--at least legally.

You see, after spending five minutes on Google I could have downloaded a pirated copy from half a dozen sites, but because I believe in paying writers for their work, I didn't want to go that route. After considerable effort, I finally located a reputable bookshop in a third country that apparently hadn't implemented IP address filtering and was willing to sell it to me as an EPUB.

My point here is that I was trying to give the publishers, the booksellers, and ultimately the author my money, and the current state of affairs made it almost impossible to do so. When companies make it easier for potential customers to download an illegal copy rather than to purchase their products legally, it's probably time for them to re-evaluate their business model, because it's going to be unsustainable in the long term.

[LuvReadin]

Originally Posted by taustin

And all this at a time when the market is demanding lower retail prices in the incorrect perception that ebooks cost a lot less to produce than paper books (when, in fact, it isn't that much less). .

That's not actually the case (well, not always, anyway). Many of the initial costs (royalties, salaries, getting the actual text into a usable format) are the same or may even be slightly higher, but from then on, it becomes very much cheaper - no costs for printing, paper* or storage, and much smaller costs for distribution. Once the file is created, there is no limit on the number of copies that can be supplied, and this incurs very little additional cost, as most of it is automated. Further savings are likely to come from not having to pay wholesalers and from having no or much smaller bookstores. Obviously, this is for a publisher supplying ebooks only - in practice, most publishers will supply paper books as well, thus reducing this difference considerably, as printing costs are highest for the initial numbers of books. Thus, although there may be a case for having ebooks sold at close to the paper edition price if this is also being produced, there is, little justification, IMO, for doing so if it isn't.

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*Which can be huge - I've worked in publishing for many years, and just by changing the type of paper used saved over £1M per year, and this was for a comparatively small publisher.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by LuvReadin

That's not actually the case (well, not always, anyway). Many of the initial costs (royalties, salaries, getting the actual text into a usable format) are the same or may even be slightly higher, but from then on, it becomes very much cheaper - no costs for printing, paper* or storage, and much smaller costs for distribution. Once the file is created, there is no limit on the number of copies that can be supplied, and this incurs very little additional cost, as most of it is automated. Further savings are likely to come from not having to pay wholesalers and from having no or much smaller bookstores. Obviously, this is for a publisher supplying ebooks only - in practice, most publishers will supply paper books as well, thus reducing this difference considerably, as printing costs are highest for the initial numbers of books. Thus, although there may be a case for having ebooks sold at close to the paper edition price if this is also being produced, there is, little justification, IMO, for doing so if it isn't.

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*Which can be huge - I've worked in publishing for many years, and just by changing the type of paper used saved over £1M per year, and this was for a comparatively small publisher.

And yet, industry insiders have gone on the record about it, and say that about 10% of the retail price is for putting ink on paper and getting it to the store. So any time you vote for more than a 10% reduction in the price of an ebook, you're voting for lower quality. So say people who I have heard of before and know to be working in the industry.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

You are not buying from a publisher, you are buying from a bookstore.

But why do that change things? If the publisher want to sell the book they just create a book seller and sell it.

I know that selling from an US publisher to an UK bookstore was considered to be brey import and not perfectly OK.

But I have never heard that that is a problem when selling books to a non English country. So people claiming that it is against the rule for an US or UK publisher to sell books to a Swedish book store kind of have to give a reference to that for me to believe it.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by tompe

But why do that change things? If the publisher want to sell the book they just create a book seller and sell it.

I know that selling from an US publisher to an UK bookstore was considered to be brey import and not perfectly OK.

But I have never heard that that is a problem when selling books to a non English country. So people claiming that it is against the rule for an US or UK publisher to sell books to a Swedish book store kind of have to give a reference to that for me to believe it.

For the umpteenth time, the contracts don't necessarily list places that are excluded, they list places that the contract allows as market areas... and if you're so damn doubting then buy some books from a publisher (as a retailer) and look at the contracts you have to sign... since I don't run a bookshop now I don't have such paperwork any more and as you are the Doubting Thomas" why should I have to waste my time searching for information to convince you... you already "think" and "believe" you're right from your vast experience in the book publishing and retail trade and don't care about the information from people who actually have such experience...

[tompe]

Originally Posted by elcreative

For the umpteenth time, the contracts don't necessarily list places that are excluded, they list places that the contract allows as market areas... and if you're so damn doubting then buy some books from a publisher (as a retailer) and look at the contracts you have to sign... since I don't run a bookshop now I don't have such paperwork any more and as you are the Doubting Thomas" why should I have to waste my time searching for information to convince you... you already "think" and "believe" you're right from your vast experience in the book publishing and retail trade and don't care about the information from people who actually have such experience...

Well, the people I know that run bookshops in Sweden have not mentioned that it should be problematic or against the rules to buy the books they are selling. I will double check the next time I meet them.

So you have run a bookshop outside US and UK?

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Technically, it is against the publishers' contracts to sell a book out of their agreed geo area but practically being near unenforceable and almost completely ignored... unfortunately for eBooks, it is relatively straightforward to trace buying point and block automatically...

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, the people I know that run bookshops in Sweden have not mentioned that it should be problematic or against the rules to buy the books they are selling. I will double check the next time I meet them.

So you have run a bookshop outside US and UK?

I've put my original quote so that you can read it again... there are two different things here, one is what is contractually legal and the other is about enforceability as I said i.e. just because it's against the rules doesn't make it difficult to do. When I worked for and later ran a specialist bookshop (in the UK, not that that makes any difference), UK publishers often knew we handled US stock but didn't bother being heavy about enforcement because we handled relatively small quantities and their reps also used to use our sales as guidlines as to what to acquire for UK printing but if we'd started importing large quantities and selling wholesale to other shops then they'd have jumped all over us...

Enforcement, ease of obtaining stock and so on practically have strong dependencies on quantities involved... in the case of English language books into non-English markets, the quantities mostly aren't worthwhile for publishers to wholesale officially and they probably don't have non-English area rights but will usually ignore someone buying small quantities from wholesalers.

[HansTWN]

Here in Taiwan grey imports for physical goods are not only allowed but actually encouraged as a way of keeping the "official" agents from ripping off customers. And when we circumvent regional restrictions, that is what we are doing, grey imports.

There is nothing that can be done legally (against grey imports), the agents could only try to find the source of the goods and ask the overseas manufacturer to cut off supplies. Usually that isn't feasible.

[Avenabo]

I'm new to this forum and have been trying to follow this thread, my brain hurts!! I'm a Brit living in Spain and I've got a Sony E Reader. Like the person from NZ, I used to buy from Smiths and Waterstones in UK. The thing I cant get my head round is that Waterstones apologised when they said they couldnt sell me ebooks any longer, but assured me I could buy the same book in paper format from them. I cant see the difference. My credit card is a UK one, my address and ISP are Spanish. If I can buy the hardcopy book, why cant I buy the ebook. Can anyone give me a simple explanation?