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View Poll Results: Would you circumvent geographical restrictions SOLELY to save money? | |||
Yes | 131 | 67.18% | |
No | 53 | 27.18% | |
Other (explain in thread, please) | 11 | 5.64% | |
Voters: 195. You may not vote on this poll |
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09-08-2013, 01:10 AM | #46 | |
Not so important
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The savings would have to be extensive though, to make it worth the hassle . Last edited by Soldim; 09-08-2013 at 01:23 AM. |
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09-08-2013, 03:31 AM | #47 | |
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09-08-2013, 03:42 AM | #48 |
Inharmonious
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Yup, my regular Norwegian VISA card, which is the only card I have.
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09-08-2013, 06:59 AM | #49 |
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I'd like to thank everyone who's posted in this thread. You've made a lot of good points, enough so that I am now willing to vote Yes in the poll and not feel ambivalent about shopping at Amazon India.
One way around this is to buy a gift card for yourself. Once it's added to your Amazon account, you'll be paying for books using the gift card balance, and then there's no surcharge. So instead of paying $2 every time you buy a book, you only pay it when you buy the gift card. |
09-08-2013, 07:32 AM | #50 |
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I don't think gift card will help. It's surcharge amazon incorporates in ebook prices, not one from my bank.
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09-08-2013, 08:42 AM | #51 | |
Groupie
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I'd certainly say I have such a morality threshold: I've had an Amazon.com account since long before they sold books in Canada. Now, whenever I order a book (even freebies — which is virtually all I use Amazon for), it offers to transfer my account to amazon.ca, but since the prices on the .com site (with currency conversion and without sales tax) are generally cheaper, I have so far refused to transfer the account. But I justify it by telling myself that they know where I am and still sell to me…. I've never actively circumvented georestriction for any reason, and don't think I would do so to get cheaper books. |
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09-08-2013, 08:53 AM | #52 | ||
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IANAL, but http://www.jltp.uiuc.edu/archives/sun.pdf says that the two are identical under the US DMCA: Quote:
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09-08-2013, 09:02 AM | #53 |
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You'd use it in conjunction with creating a local Amazon account. If you shop from a lot of different Amazon stores you may end up with several Amazon accounts, so it may not be worth the hassle to you, but it's a proven method to get around it.
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09-08-2013, 09:10 AM | #54 |
o saeclum infacetum
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Leaving aside those pesky morality and nuisance issues, as a matter of prudence, given Amazon's history of banning people without warning and without recourse, I wouldn't find it worth it to engage in a dicey practice that Amazon is fully capable of detecting.
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09-08-2013, 10:17 AM | #55 |
Enthusiast
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How much do you have to lose? One assumes you did what 99% of MR posters do, and de-DRM any Kindle books you may have and back them up locally?
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09-08-2013, 10:39 AM | #56 |
o saeclum infacetum
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It wouldn't be the loss of the stuff I've got, it would be the inability to shop at Amazon proper and the Kindle store in the future. Not worth saving a few bucks here or there or getting the odd book not available here.
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09-08-2013, 10:45 AM | #57 |
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The reason you can create multiple addresses in Amazon regardless of where your credit card is billed is that Amazon subscribes to the notion that if you happen to be travelling in the US, you should be entitled to purchase items from the US store etc...
You don't actually need separate accounts, just a different address to indicate you are currently in a different country. I don't know how particular Amazon really are in trying to curtail abuse of this functionality as sales are essentially sales. But I guess there's no reason why they couldn't crack down on this sort of thing with clever algorithms. As for the morality of the issue, I have a problem with ebooks sold in Australia being priced higher than ebooks in other areas if the book is not actually published in Australia. I don't have any issues in circumventing geo-restrictions in that particular scenario. However, I might think a little differently if the book is clearly published in Australia for the following reason. A book published in Australia is likely to use Australian English and it might not be practical for an author to expect the Australian publisher to produce the same book for all markets. Therefore, I imagine that selling international rights might be quite prevalent for Australian authors. This means that for the Australian publisher they are probably only ever looking at a fairly limited market in comparison with other countries. I don't necessarily know the answer to these conundrums and I'm basically only sharing my own deductions which might not be 100% factual. I am happier to punish local publishers in one context, but not quite as much in others, which may well seem a little hypocritical. Ah - life! |
09-08-2013, 11:35 AM | #58 | |
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09-08-2013, 03:44 PM | #59 |
E bookworm
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Someone should ask Amazon why the cost difference.. but them we already know that vendors will charge what they think they can get off with regardless of the cost of producing the article go ahead if you can get it cheaper
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09-08-2013, 04:33 PM | #60 | |
Maria Schneider
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Quote:
The author/publisher owns the rights to various regions, not Amazon (unless they are the publisher.) We also set a base price. Amazon can choose to take a loss on that, but the higher the base price, the larger their loss would be. |
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