For all that many publishers own international rights to ebooks, they don't make them available; customers & authors have bemoaned the geographic restrictions in a lot of ebookstores. (Apparently, publishers are looking for foreign markets to sell those ebooks, and don't want them available in the meantime because that would spoil their ability to *pitch* the books to those markets. Gah.)
Australia's take on the restrictions is that they're irrelevant to consumers; feel free to bypass them if you can. (And that makes sense. The laws on sales restrictions are for resellers, not individual purchasers. If you can buy a physical book from Amazon.com & have it shipped to the Netherlands, there's no reason you can't buy a Kindlebook and download it to the Netherlands. The idea that ebook sales happen in a different location from physical sales is just... whacked.)
The idea that people will pay $14 for a *40-year-old-book* that's available for $8 for the paperback new... and $.01 + shipping for it used... shows how oblivious they are to the actual market. Yes, some people will buy it. Some will download it from various less-than-legit sources. And more will just ignore it, tag it as "meh, I don't need that as an ebook; I can always re-read the paper version."
Which, of course, allows publishers to insist that ebooks are a niche market and most people don't want them. Put the damn thing out at $5, non-DRM'd, like Baen does, and watch the sales *skyrocket* every time the SciFi channel re-shows the movie or the miniseries. (Of course, not gonna do that.)
Re: hmmm. Food for thought.
Australia's take on the restrictions is that they're irrelevant to consumers; feel free to bypass them if you can. (And that makes sense. The laws on sales restrictions are for resellers, not individual purchasers. If you can buy a physical book from Amazon.com & have it shipped to the Netherlands, there's no reason you can't buy a Kindlebook and download it to the Netherlands. The idea that ebook sales happen in a different location from physical sales is just... whacked.)
The idea that people will pay $14 for a *40-year-old-book* that's available for $8 for the paperback new... and $.01 + shipping for it used... shows how oblivious they are to the actual market. Yes, some people will buy it. Some will download it from various less-than-legit sources. And more will just ignore it, tag it as "meh, I don't need that as an ebook; I can always re-read the paper version."
Which, of course, allows publishers to insist that ebooks are a niche market and most people don't want them. Put the damn thing out at $5, non-DRM'd, like Baen does, and watch the sales *skyrocket* every time the SciFi channel re-shows the movie or the miniseries. (Of course, not gonna do that.)