Current pain in my butt

[debgeisler]

"The Kindle title you have selected is not available for your country. Please try Amazon.com."

Look, idiots, if it had been at Amazon.com, I wouldn't be at Amazon.co.uk, now, would I?

*grrrrrr*

Wonder if I can buy these while I'm in Amsterdam in December? Worth a try.

Comments

[ceemage.livejournal.com]

Worth a try. Of course, it's possible they'll take your money, give you the title -- then sneakily remove it the 1st time you re-sync Stateside.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

That, of course, is my fear. Bastards.

[timill]

That, of course, is why people have Calibre and the DRM removal tools...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

You might try TunnelBear. It's a relatively easy application that makes your computer look like it has a UK IP address, and thus Amazon.co.uk thinks you're in the UK and can sell to you. The free version has limited bandwidth (enough to let you prove to yourself that it works), and I found that its speed was severely limited -- not fast enough to watch streaming video, as opposed to my "native" connection -- but it does work.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted...as long as the titles don't go away because of some later DRM issue.

Probably not.

[parrismcb.livejournal.com]

The Kindle is tied to your US account, just like my own Kindle and iPad. It's one of those weird bumps since publishers may own the rights to publish Fred Smith's books in the UK, but not in the USA. Or there is a publisher for Fred Smith's books in the USA, but the USA publisher can't be bothered, for whatever reason, to publish or keep in 'print' Fred Smith's books in the USA.

I ran into this when we went to Australia last year. I wanted to buy guides to Australian flora and fauna for my iPad/iPod touch. I have a couple of North American guides on both of those machines and really enjoy using their multi-media approach to birding - the current Kindle was only B&W and was therefore out of the running for guide books.

So I went looking on the USA iBooks store. No Aussie birding books available from the USA store. Now, I could order a hardcopy edition of an Aussie bird book and have it delivered to my house in Santa Fe. I could go into a bookstore in Melbourne and buy a copy while in the country, but I couldn't get the book in e-book format for my USA-tied iPad. Since the whole idea was to save me carrying the 3-5 pounds that a complete bird/flora/fauna guide book can weigh and give me more information than a physical plain-paper book can offer with features like multiple photos/vids/recordings of songs, I found myself frustrated by these restrictions.

I have a few authors who are not very popular in the States and have no USA publisher, or their USA publisher only keeps in print a handful of titles by the author and I want to read everything they've written and published in their home country. I can order their titles from Amazon UK, or a host of other businesses that offer on-line sale to the international markets, the books will arrive in the mail, eventually.

But the current restrictions on what can be sold where are frustrating to those who want to purchase e-texts only offered in another country. Pat Cadigan put together a collection of her own short stories since she was getting ripped off by a scumbag on-line. But she's only put it in the UK Amazon store, so I can't buy a copy of it.

I note from personal experience that George has multiple publishers of the same title in different countries, even if you just restrict those titles to English-language publishers. In the USA, the ASoI&F titles are published by Bantam Spectra/Random House. In the UK, they are published by HarperCollins UK. It's likely that both publishers don't want their sales 'poached' by the other publisher, especially if there's different pub dates in the two countries. That's one reason why Bantam and HCUK came to an agreement to publish ADWD on the same day. HCUK had been releasing the titles weeks, if not months, before the USA release for the earlier novels. HCUK was selling thousands of copies of the hardcovers to USA buyers, some of them even ordering overnight delivery which cost more than the actual book, just so they could read the book and be up on the forums with their opinions and predictions on what would happen in the next book that George hadn't even started writing yet, before most of the poor saps in the USA had the chance to toddle down to their local bookstore or receive in the mail their own USA edition of the book. (see rest of comment in next post)...

Re: Probably not.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Yeah - mine isn't a Kindle, but an iPad running Kindle software. And this is a case where the books are just utterly unavailable in the US. *sigh*

I actually own the hard copy of the books...just wanted them electronically, too. So I guess they don't travel with me.

and then I wrote...

[parrismcb.livejournal.com]

HCUK also sells a lot of copies to English-language titles to readers across most of Europe. Since translation into another language, such as Spanish or German can take months to accomplish, and then the local publisher has to decide when to release the translated book, many people who have strong English language abilities don't wait, they just buy the HCUK edition and don't bother with waiting for their native-language release. (And translations can be problematical as to the quality of the translation, as we hear from readers who have read the books in English and in their native language).

I hope that some of these restrictions are eased in the future. If I'm in Melbourne, the ISP notes that yes, I'm actually in Melbourne, and with that confirmation, I should be able to buy the e-book that's only available from the Aussie publisher. But that's not the case now, and I imagine it's going to take several more years and a lot of demand from buyers before publishers and e-book sellers sort out some reasonable compromise that allows non-residents of one country to purchase titles available in another country, whether they're standing on Oxford street in London or just want that missing title by Jane Jones that is OOP in the states but is available from a publisher in the UK.

If all else fails, I can assure you that Amsterdam has several excellent English language bookstores, where you can look for your desired books, or maybe you can arrange for a friendly person you'll be seeing while visiting the Netherlands to accept delivery from Amazon UK for you and deliver the books to you when you're visiting Amsterdam.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That's disturbing. One can use foreign Amazon sites to buy hardcopy books, or editions of books, that aren't for sale in the U.S., but not these? Interesting.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Yeah - it's a matter of the epub rights, and who has them. But it does annoy me that I could buy the hard copy and not the epub. (For that matter, I can buy the physical books in the US...there is, apparently, just no epublisher for them.)

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

This is why I kept (thanks to eackerman my US credit cards and made sure my Nook was registered to a US address and credit card... Of course, that's also why I bought the Nook, because it's less proprietary than the Kindle.

If it's because of your account, you're SOL. However, if it's because of your computer location, you might want to try Hotspot Shield, an easily installed IP address spoofer.

Are you sure the books aren't available somewhere else in ePub format?

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

I may try one of the IP maskers and see what it does. :-) Thanks!

[galtine1.livejournal.com]

Openlibrary.org is trying to build an online lendinglibrary as well as a digital card catalog of all ebooks published.

and Smashwords.com for indie authors and some mainstream ones and you can download in several formats without going to Amazon/BN/etc.