UK publishers assured over territoriality following Kindle launch

[Crowl]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

So the question becomes "Who has the legal right to sell it to you?", as specified by the contract for the book.

It's possible no one does. It's more likely depending on where you are that you could get it cheaper from a foreign supplier. Your local supplier has an interest called "Wanting to stay in business" in preventing that...

There are plenty of cases where you simply cannot buy a particular ebook in a certain region though and its only due to the idiocy of ebooks being classed as a service rather than the product it so clearly is that they are able to prevent people from ordering from abroad in exactly the same way they did with paper books that were unavailable to them in their region.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I am hurt as much by regional restrictions as the next guy, but remember, books were always cheaper in the US. Only with pbooks you paid more for shipping and handling than the price difference was. And a big part of the price difference is VAT. It is time for Europeans to petition your governments for a VAT free internet zone, like in the US.

Most of the time you should be paying tax... I'd rather not have the complex patchwork of laws which allow the government to nail almost anyone who annoys them for tax evasion, thanks.

No, there's just good reason to reduce the VAT rate of ebooks to the same as that for print books. No need for getting into "internet zone" at all.

[talking_walnut]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As the UK is a much smaller market, UK publishers pretty much have to charge higher prices.

But removing the region restrictions means they don't have a smaller market. We're moving into the age of the global economy. They're going to have to adapt or they'll get left behind.

[Kali Yuga]

While it would be nice to trash every existing contract with every author , unfortunately that isn't quite feasible at this time.

Besides, there are legit reasons for regional publishers and pricing. Different nations have different laws, different tax rates and mechanisms, different payment mechanisms, distinct marketing and PR needs, etc. Many publishers just won't have the local expertise (let alone language skills) to operate well in many foreign nations. And in many cases you probably can't charge the same amount for a book in all nations, e.g. some nations will charge a higher tax rate or some type of VAT, others may not.

Plus, I may be wrong about this, but I expect that (largely for tax reasons) if you want to do business in a specific nation, your business needs to be registered in that country -- similar to how if you want to do business in both California and Nevada, you need to file all sorts of forms and register to do business in those states.

Although it may seem like a snap to put up a website and sell internationally, I don't think it's really quite that easy in practice.

Originally Posted by cheese bogart

I'm not so sure that britain is a smaller market. I read somewhere (not that long ago) that britain and germany combined, buy more books than the USA and thats with the former still having roughly half the population.

I'm afraid you read wrong. Book sales in the US were around $36 billion last year, UK $3.5 billion, Germany $14 billion. It's possible they buy more books per capita though.