If only I lived in the US.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

Yes, it is the fault of all these publishers, I agree.

However, in this particular instance of named favorite shops, it is the USA that misses out on the cash.

No it's not. It's U.S. and Europe based publishers who're losing out on the money. (Well, the authors lose a *TINY BIT* of each lost sale, but then what major publisher really 'cares' about the suffering of it's stable of authors???)

Derek

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Agree!
What happened to globalization in publishing industry??
They are in denial and dark ages!!
No wonder pirates are unleashing their forces.

No wonder indeed!

It's almost as if they took a look around and decided, "RIAA, U R Doin It Rong!" - instead of grasping that the less restrictions/DRM the greater the sales, they've chosen to encourage every household to become a closet book pirate.

Derek

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Exactly. If anybody should find out, it's just a misunderstanding or some major typos you made.

"You mean, I'm not living in New York? Oops, thanks for the reminder, buddy! I didn't notice!"

This is something I am baulking at doing. It may not be wholly illegal, considering that these options are almost a last resort in order to be able to buy the book you want, but my morality meter is beeping at me.

[dragonbone]

Originally Posted by lente

I don't know if this is the right place to vent my grievances with the way things are going with ebooks so feel free to throw this away or move it, trample it, spit on it, anything you like.

I'm a big fan of ebooks. I own a BeBook ereader for a while now and I have already enjoyed reading many books on it, but that has changed. Geographical restriction. I think most you can guess my problem from these two words. I can no longer buy the ebooks that I want, because I live in the Netherlands (yes, that's in Europe) and not in the US. I'm super pissed.

Oh I understand the reasons, but the reasons mean shit to me. I'm child of the internet age and I want my ebooks. I don't care if they come from the US, china or the moon. I used to just pirate them, yes I was a bad, bad boy, but I grew a conscience. This is costing me a lot of money, but it makes me feel better. Yet now that I am finally spending money on ebooks they begin to tighten their geographical restrictions. This isn't new, but it used to be that most books didn't have these restriction. The opposite is now true, I can no longer buy most ebooks.

Oh sure, I can still buy a lot of crappy title's. You know the cheap title's no one buys. Most ebook stores are now useless to me. The only exceptions are Bean's webscription (I love these guys, and you should too!) and Smashwords (I haven't used this one yet, but I've heard good things about it). I can no longer use my favourite ebooks stores - booksonboard, fictionwise and diesel-books -, because most of the good books from my favourite author's are now US, CA only. I know, they can't help it, it's those greedy publishers.

I can tell you I have been seriously tempted to go back to my wicked ways, but in the end I decided to remain on the path of righteousness. I will have to go back to buying paperbacks, because I don't think this will be sorted out any time soon. They will probable begin to sell more ebooks internationally, but at a higher price, just like amazon is doing now with their kindle machine and ebooks weren't that cheap to begin with. I will not pay more money for a ebook than I will for a paper version.

That's it, can think of anything else to complain about. If you have read this far: thank you for your time.

Same here! I can't buy ebooks easily - if at all. I can't buy them from the Sony store for my ereader unless I get gift cards. Until very recently I couldn't buy any ebooks from Amazon.com, even though I could get any pbook shipped to me, and have done so (on a large scale) all the years as an expat. Now that I can buy ebooks form Amazon.com, the choices are very limited. Every second or third book is not available to my geographical location. I just couldn't be bothered...

I was furious that I had to lie when I registered my ereader. It may not really be illegal, but still...

Since Amazon.com bought Audible.com a few years ago, the exact same thing is happening to my audiobooks ie. not available to my geographical location. What a joke that the publishers don't want or need our money. A click or two of the mouse later - any any ebook, or audiobook I want, can be downloading to my PC FOR FREE. Don't they understand that?

[asjogren]

Yes, these geographic restrictions are tough on the ex-patriot community - even on me when I live in the US half of the year. My Spanish is not good enough yet to read for enjoyment. There is insufficient market for English language book or eBook vendors in Mexico.

Why should the Tokyo resident be restricted from buying eBooks in English from outside Japan? There is not much business for the local distributors to lose.

Why should the Brit living in Spain be restricted from buying eBooks from the UK? I doubt his local market supplies much in English.

It seems easy to comprehend, if the book's language is NOT that of the buyer's country - there is NO market to lose.

Perhaps some of us have become global citizens, yet the multinational publishing industry has not.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

They are American bookstores, but exactly the same would apply if he wanted to buy from Waterstones or W.H.Smiths in the UK.

Hmm...last time I shopped at Waterstones they were quite happy to sell to me (Smiths told me to get stuffed, though).

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by nick101

Oh, except for the bit where they decided that borders etc were not outmoded when it came to making money

Or avoiding paying taxes.

[colinsky]

Originally Posted by asjogren

Why should the Brit living in Spain be restricted from buying eBooks from the UK? I doubt his local market supplies much in English.

My assumption is that the publication rights for English in (non-English-speaking) country are tied together with translated publication rights -- perhaps to support the possibility of a local bi-lingual edition.

[ill_dawg]

At least to an ex-pat living in SE-Asia, the whole thing is stupid. If I go to the local shops, they're full of pirated DVDs, photocopies books, knockoff clothing & electronics, etc. The only way to be sure I'm getting the real thing is usually to go through a big store on the internet. With ebooks, it just seems stupid that I can steal them but I can't buy them. How is it that a pbook can be shipped to me, but it is unthinkable to copy some information and send that instead? They do everything they can to push me out of the legitimate market. If they did nothing to stop me from buying books, or if I just had to lie on a form, I'd do it. But, since they are doing everything they can to stop me from giving them my money, I don't even feel bad about going to the darknets.

[dragonbone]

Originally Posted by ill_dawg

At least to an ex-pat living in SE-Asia, the whole thing is stupid. If I go to the local shops, they're full of pirated DVDs, photocopies books, knockoff clothing & electronics, etc. The only way to be sure I'm getting the real thing is usually to go through a big store on the internet. With ebooks, it just seems stupid that I can steal them but I can't buy them. How is it that a pbook can be shipped to me, but it is unthinkable to copy some information and send that instead? They do everything they can to push me out of the legitimate market. If they did nothing to stop me from buying books, or if I just had to lie on a form, I'd do it. But, since they are doing everything they can to stop me from giving them my money, I don't even feel bad about going to the darknets.

Exactly!

[HansTWN]

True enough, but we can easily live in the US for ebook buying purposes, since these restrictions are rather easy to circumvent. And for you US expats, why don't you just get a credit card from a US bank with the address of family and friends? Then you are covered, no matter how strict they make these restrictions.

[ill_dawg]

@hans: I could use a US credit card, but there is still IP blocking. I could get around that by using proxies, which I wouldn't trust with my credit card info, or a VPN, which I would have to pay for. It's not worth my time to jump through hoops in an attempt to pay for something that it takes me 5 minutes to get for free. I could waste my money and my time to support stupid policies, or I can protest them in a way that makes my life easier.

[lente]

Originally Posted by sabredog

This is something I am baulking at doing. It may not be wholly illegal, considering that these options are almost a last resort in order to be able to buy the book you want, but my morality meter is beeping at me.

The same here, don't you wish that that little angel on your shoulder would go on vacation sometimes?

[Toxaris]

I hear you. I also live in the Netherlands and have the same problems.

I usually want to have the original version (UK for UK writers, US for US writers, NL for dutch writers). That really posses problems with geo restrictions...

You will have to do some effort, but most of the time you will find the book you want on either a site which ignores geo restrictions or where you can work around. BoB usally works fine and I even succeded in buying at Kobo. However, the latter could be that I had a VPN connection to my work (not a US company however).

When will they learn that geo restriction will not work. I am perfectly happy to by the versions I want from dutch retailers. However, they either cannot deliver or charge twice the price the US-based retailers do. For what? Import of bits and bytes? Shipping?

[lente]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

If they would sell it here... There are a few online booksellers who sell English books. But those are in epub. And I have absolutely no use for epub. Also, those books are twice as expensive as on American bookstores (due to an even weirder rule than geographic restrictions, namely that ebooks aren't books but download services and thus attract the high VAT).

Luckily, there are plenty of ways of cicrumventing those restrictions. So, I'm faced with a choice. Pirate a book (and do something illegal, even though that's debatable here) or buy a restricted book oversees, lying about my locations (which is also illegal).

It's the opposite for me, I don't have any use for mobipocket format, that is the other format they sell. regardless of the format the selection is very poor, that's the real problem.