Using the 505 in Australia

[charlieperry]

What other stores? As far as I can tell Dymocks is the only bookshop which sells new ebooks in Australia. Importing books from overseas is technically illegal I think.

[moz]

Originally Posted by charlieperry

Importing books from overseas is technically illegal I think.

As far as I know Australia has no laws protecting book distributors from competition. We don't even have laws preventing you from playing protected content on non-approved devices (region-locked DVDs etc). You can definitely buy books overseas and bring them in for personal use without any problems.

Importing books for resale may break the contract between publisher and distributor that you bought the books off, but even that has IIRC been challenged. Viz, the distributor in (say) the US signs a contract with the publisher saying "the books I buy will only be sold in the US", then sells them to you to sell in Oz. The Oz distributor probably also has a contract that says "you will only buy books published by us direct from us". Neither of those contracts binds you in any way at all. They might make it hard to get trade prices from the distributor, but that does not mean it's illegal to ask.

There was a court case a while ago against one of those "megacheap book sale" places on the basis that they were selling US editions of books that were not approved for sale in Australia by the copyright holder. Once the judge stopped laughing the publisher was told that copyright does not work like that in Australia. Either the material is legitimate or not, and since the books in question were printed for the publisher it's all good.

I don't know the law on unprotecting content, but I believe that's legal (it's not in the US).

[charlieperry]

Interesting. I might read up on it a bit.

[keith]

Well from a practical point of view people in Australia have been buying books, CDs and DVDs from Amazon and other online stores for years. Most of the eBook stores will sell books to Australia with exceptions for some books where copyright restrictions or the publisher prevent them doing so.

[charlieperry]

Someone told me that to sell books in Australia you have to have bought them from an Australian publisher. Something to do with the parallel importing rules

[keith]

I imagine that applies to selling books in Australia after importation as opposed to Amazon selling a book to an online customer and mailing it to Australia.