Kobo website, new change-your-country option

[GeoffR]

I think this is new, but maybe I just didn't notice it before.

At the bottom left of the Kobo home page there is now a button to change your country, so it is no longer necessary to log in and change your account address, or use a VPN, to see prices in other countries.

www.kobo.com/choose-your-country

[ottdmk]

Note the small print (literally):

Please note: if your billing information doesn't match your selected country, you may not be able to complete your purchase.

Still, definitely interesting for price comparisons.

[davidfor]

Clicking the flag at the top of the page also does this.

[GeoffR]

The URL structure has changed too, allowing external links to books in specific countries. It used to be that following a link to a book always showed you the book in the local store, now it works more like the Apple store where you can just change the country code in the URL to see prices in different countries.

E.g. I can now supply links to this book in the NZ store and in the UK store which makes it easier to post about price discrepancies.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

The URL structure has changed too, allowing external links to books in specific countries. It used to be that following a link to a book always showed you the book in the local store, now it works more like the Apple store where you can just change the country code in the URL to see prices in different countries.

E.g. I can now supply links to this book in the NZ store and in the UK store which makes it easier to post about price discrepancies.

I was wondering about that earlier and the effect it would have on links posted in the deals forum. In the past, it showed the AU price no matter what the link showed. Now, I'm going to see whatever the poster used.

And for that book: NZ - $14.99, AU - $11.99, GB - £0.99. Is there a sale on in England?

[Sweetpea]

It's a start, but not what I want. The Kobo website is kind of useless to me right now, as I only see Dutch books and I must jump a lot of hoops before I see English books. And I can't even remember the last time I bought a Dutch book...

(so, I want the Dutch region, with the Dutch pricing and Dutch availability, but English language books first)

[anacreon]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

It's a start, but not what I want. The Kobo website is kind of useless to me right now, as I only see Dutch books and I must jump a lot of hoops before I see English books. And I can't even remember the last time I bought a Dutch book...

(so, I want the Dutch region, with the Dutch pricing and Dutch availability, but English language books first)

I've always changed the flag top right on the Kobo to English / Italian / German / Spanish / French according to the language of the book I want to buy. The site memorizes the last language I chose, so I do have to turn back to French if I want to buy a book in French.

[ATDrake]

I'm just curious, but does Kobo's left-hand navigation drop-down for selecting and filtering ebook languages not work in Europe for some reason? In Canada I have no problems searching for and choosing to see only books in English, French, German, Chinese, or any other of the available languages they sell, regardless of whether I'm browsing the anglophone or francophone versions of the site.

[anacreon]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I'm just curious, but does Kobo's left-hand navigation drop-down for selecting and filtering ebook languages not work in Europe for some reason? In Canada I have no problems searching for and choosing to see only books in English, French, German, Chinese, or any other of the available languages they sell, regardless of whether I'm browsing the anglophone or francophone versions of the site.

Well, that is what I was speaking of, only for me it is on the right hand.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by anacreon

Well, that is what I was speaking of, only for me it is on the right hand.

I think perhaps we may be speaking of two different website features, since you mentioned a top-right flag in your original comment upthread, which I also have for changing the interface language and defaulting search results to that (and is repeated as a list of links at the bottom-right of each page), but isn't the same thing.

I was probably unclear, sorry, but I meant instead the additional left-hand navigation menu that shows up in the sidebar after doing a search, for which I see a Languages item (just below the Categories and above the Pricing) which can be set to All or just to filter onto a selected language.

In any case, one should be able to filter the languages for a search from any version of the website by appending

&fclanguages=fr

and substituting the ISO code for the applicable language if they carry it (sometimes buggy; using is for Icelandic actually brings up Russian unless you add an Icelandic search word) to see more relevant books.

E.g. German, Chinese, Hungarian. Search for Sebastian Fitzek as author with 27 results for all 6 translated languages his books are sold in Canada, which includes Polish (not available as an interface language).

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by anacreon

I've always changed the flag top right on the Kobo to English / Italian / German / Spanish / French according to the language of the book I want to buy.

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I'm just curious, but does Kobo's left-hand navigation drop-down for selecting and filtering ebook languages not work in Europe for some reason? In Canada I have no problems searching for and choosing to see only books in English, French, German, Chinese, or any other of the available languages they sell, regardless of whether I'm browsing the anglophone or francophone versions of the site.

For me in the UK the menu towards the top right of the screen has nothing to do with changing language of the books. The menu options say:
'United Kingdom | English | Gift Cards | Help'

The UK is represented by a flag and this is for changing the Kobo store to another region, the English next to that simply changes the language of the website (all the menu options and buttons) to another language, the books on sale are still in English.

The same as ATDrake, once you are browsing the categories of books, there is a navigation menu on the left of the screen and it also contains an option to filter books by language. Its quite bizarre to find 1-3 books available on the site in languages like Western Frisian, Indonesian, Occitan, Sardinian, etc.