Martin, you certainly need a lot of “schooling” on the real e-book world… you’re letting a lot of Amazon hype blind you from seeing the whole picture.

Try stopping at MobileRead.com sometime… the information you get there is very international, covers multiple e-book formats, sellers and sales models. You’ll get much more of the “total picture” there, than lurking around geo-restricted sites like Amazon.

Most importantly: Don’t panic! It’s early yet. It’s not all perfect, but we’re getting there…

Essentially we are looking at one more example of copyright law not keeping up with the times. Now most countries (if not all) in the WTO are also signatories to the Berne convention, because it would be interesting to see if these geographic restrictions are an illegal restraint of trade.

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Bill

Martin, we share your frustration and not being able to provide a better service to customers outside North America.

At the moment publishers give us the right to sell roughly 50% of our catalog globally. Our service respects these geo rights and prevents unauthorized purchases. However since such a large portion of the catalog is unavailable the customers outside North America their experience is poor.

We are working to enhance Shortcovers so that it shows to each user only the content that they are entitled to purchase (based on their location). We expect to release this sometime in October.

We would love to your feedback – please contact me if you would like to be part of our beta testing program.

Shortcovers even has georestricted excerpts!

So does Apple (for music, movies). No reason to think they wouldn’t for books.

This is not an inherent characteristic of ebooks, this is an entirely intentional crippling “feature” publishers like the author keep trying (unsuccessfully) to push onto ebooks.

If the author can’t see the advantages of being able to hold a library of hundreds of books in the palm of his hand (and hundreds of thousands of books on the hard drive of a laptop) then he is beyond help.

Also, an ebook is *not* the reader device, the ebook is the file of bits a reader device interprets and displays for the person reading it. Again too many publishers want to force the bits to live only on one (or a couple of) physical reading devices so they can pretend an ebook is something physical when it’s not. ebooks are *data*, not physical objects like pbooks, if you don’t comprehend the difference then you have no hope of survival in the 21st century marketplace.

but i know publishers like people to buy books, and don’t care whether they read them. in fact it’s better for publishers if people buy and *don’t* read, because then people have more time to buy more.

don’t worry, though. i still buy print. i just don’t read it unless i have time while i’m at home (=pretty much never. or unless it’s a craft book, which is a different thing altogether. more of a tool.)

i buy electronic copies to read; print copies to ‘have’. and i’m duplicating a chunk of my print collection with electronic purchases. so i’m all good news for publishers; and i am only one of many just like me…