Using US amazon.com account on non-US Kindle

[sweeper76]

Hi, I'm a Canadian living in Japan, and I use a US amazon.com account.

My Kindle Paperwhite has had no problems with keeping my amazon.com ebooks intact. But I'm planning on buying a Kindle Voyage soon, and I've seen various articles mentioning people whose amazon.com Kindle account has been transferred, whether unknowingly, automatically, mistakenly, or in some other manner, to the country in which they reside or where they bought their Kindle. And this has led to different prices, book availability, anxiety, migraines, sickness, and host of other problems.

Canadian Kindle Owners Forced To Leave American Kindle Content & Features Behind

Amazon Now Forcing Canadian Kindle Owners to Switch to Canadian Kindle Store

These articles are from 2013, obviously not the current Voyage era, but they still made me wonder.

I'm a first-time poster here, but have done some research, and there were some interesting tips in threads like this:
Kindle in Canada, book selection question
Kindle PaperWhite 2 from japan - guarantee ?
I want to buy a Kindle PW in Japan. (Launched 19 Nov)
I've learned various tips from the above threads, such as the fact the 3G Kindle bought in Japan only has 3G access in Japan but not the rest of the world.

However, in some threads it seems as the whole 'Manage Your Country' stuff is a piece of cake, going back and forth between different countries' shops is no problem, but in other threads/articles I read about more negative experiences. So for the current situation, in case anyone has some recent experience, especially with the Voyage: if I want to keep having my past ebooks available and the availability to keep purchasing ebooks from the US amazon.com store, should I somehow get a Voyage shipped from the US? If so, Amazon won't ship it to me since I'm outside of the US, but should I find one on eBay?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[HarryT]

There's no problem at all with using a US Amazon account from a different country, but you should be aware that Amazon will, from time to time, ask you to provide documentary proof that you are in the US, if that's where you claim to be, but your IP address says otherwise. They have to do this because their contract with publishers prohibits them from selling certain books to people outside the US (and the same in other countries, too, of course).

[sweeper76]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There's no problem at all with using a US Amazon account from a different country, but you should be aware that Amazon will, from time to time, ask you to provide documentary proof that you are in the US, if that's where you claim to be, but your IP address says otherwise. They have to do this because their contract with publishers prohibits them from selling certain books to people outside the US (and the same in other countries, too, of course).

Thanks for the reply! That's interesting, I've been using a Canadian credit card the whole time I've had a Kindle, and then a Kindle PW, and I was using it in Japan! Not sure if I just got lucky.

If I ever experience the kind of checks you talk about, unless I go to more extreme lengths to show proof of a US address (which I don't have), then I guess I should just take my chances with a Kindle Voyage bought here in Japan, rather than trying to get a US-origin Kindle from eBay.

[jeffyen]

The other concern of getting a Kindle from Japan is that if there's a hardware problem, Amazon US tech support will not honour it. (They know, from the serial number.) Therefore, you need to talk to the tech support in Japan, in Japanese.