Great. Publishers are blind and are replicating business models that have shown with the music that are completely out of sync. with their customers.

If obtaining content for your device is difficult, cumbersome and somehow expensive, then we are opening the doors to Piracy. If piracy goes in, then forget it, the cost of the content will depreciate to 0(as in music or movies).

Moving on, I live in Brazil and just got my Kindle a few days ago. I’m loving it and, because of it, I started buying books for it. I’ve been buying books from Amazon for more than 10 years now; to be able to buy a book and get it immediately, without waiting weeks for shipping (and without paying for shipping) is a definite plus.

The downer is that I noticed that for a lot of authors that I like there are no books available in my region, although they are available for the Kindle in the US. Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami and Jonathan Lethem being just three examples on the top of my head. It’s just annoying.

I just hope that authors, publishers and retailers figure this out so these restrictions are lifted.

It also works in reverse. If you are an American and want to buy an e-book, say the new Tim Winton novel, how did you find out about this book in the first place? From the American publisher, yeah. So, if you lived in America and the only publisher who owns the rights is the Australian Publisher, you would never even hear of the book because the Australian publisher can’t afford to market in America. This novel would never see the light of day overseas. It’s international rights sales that ensures there is the appropriate amount of marketing and support behind a book and an author.

And to all of you naive people bashing the publishing industry and calling publishers stupid,
get some perspective. Books (e- or p-) don’t just drop out of the sky, perfectly written, edited and formatted for your consumption. Have a think about what you would be reading if there were no publishers.

And yes, in the interests of full disclosure, I do work in the publishing industry.

Great idea. I will encourage authors to comment. Meanwhile, I’ll explain that agents have traditionally held back territorial rights on behalf of their authors because they’ve been able to earn more money selling those rights to different publishers directly, rather than selling world rights to one publisher and hoping that the publisher will do a good job of sub-licensing them. Here’s the good (anecdotal) news: I’m seeing more and more cases where authors and agents grant world rights to the originating publisher in order to take advantage of digital opportunities. That doesn’t help with backlist issues, but I hope it will help with frontlist and forthcoming titles.
Most readers don’t care about these details — naturally, we just want to get books and read them. But many of us turn to forums like this one so that we can gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of publishing, both e- and p-.

All we, as customers who want to legally purchase and not steal ebooks, can do is point out the apparent idiocy of imposing geographical restrictions on their sale – particularly when it does not apply to pbooks.

So, to enlighten us further, why don’t invite one of your authors onto Teleread? It would be fascinating to understand why they want to restrict sales of their books and earn less money.

$250 will get you around 4 Australian hardback books new. I can easily read that in a day if I really really want to. Throw in a paperback with the change.

Haven’t seen any tech that only lasts a day on average!

And *I* would enjoy it more if the publishers were willing to sell books to everyone at fair prices and if they were *better informed* on their customers needs…

The problem is, you are thinking about technical and logistical reasons why you do a certain thing, and the customers are thinking in common sense and those are not always the same thing. For example, I remember when the dollar was at par and the Canadian customers started buying books in the US because they were so much cheaper. The Canadian publishers did a big editorial in the Globe and Mail explaining why the books were more expensive and urging the customers to be patriotic and buy the more expensive ones. Now, put on your ‘customer’ hat for a second and think like a logical, rational person. ‘You can pay $25 for this or you can pay $11. Will you consider voluntarily choosing to pay $25?’ Um, no. What average person would?

If you want to sell to customers, you have to offer them *both* a product they want *and* a price they are willing to pay. If you don’t, you won’t sell, your business will die, and it will have nothing to do with “pirates” or any such nonsense. If you currently cannot or will not a) offer the product and b) do so at a price your customer is willing to pay, you need to streamline your business model and cut costs so that it’s viable for you to do so. The writers here being more ‘informed’ or less informed will not change this basic economic truth.

Just consider how many books you can buy for 250$
If you like the readability of paper so much… buy a paper book.

By the time you finish reading 250$ worth of books your fancy ereader will be a piece of junk

These things are way too pricey.

I read tons of stuff every day and stopped using the PRS-500 because I cannot get content on it.

I work at a publishing house. If you could convince all of our authors to grant us world rights so that we could sell their e- and p-books with no territorial restrictions, I’d hire you in a heartbeat!

I enjoy following TeleRead but would enjoy it even more if its tone were less adversarial and its writers better informed on book industry practices.

What! I don’t see how they’ll get away with that!

It’s been established that the point of sale is the location of the person that buys the goods, not the location of the seller. That’s why we have the regional restrictions problem with ebook sales, and why, even if we can buy books from the US, EU customers get charged VAT.

And they’re now saying that, no matter where the customer is physically when buying a book, they’ll apply restrictions and charges as if the customer was in their “home” country?

The publishers will surely complain bitterly about this breach of their regional sales rights as they have about other breaches of the rights. And if I live in the UK, why should I be prevented from buying from American publishers if I’m actually visiting the US? (Or vice-versa.)

I hope the publishers are concentrating on preventing problems like this in the future. Chris Meadows has that exactly right.

Anyone know the answer to this?

Besides… as an early adopter of the SONY Reader I would advise everyone not to buy a specialized device that can only do one thing and that you cannot load applications to.
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Gee, I dunno, but I see several hundred million people each year buying PMPs that only play music and (maybe) video and they seem to do okay.

And with dedicated ereaders going down to US$200 and under (vs the $500-1000 of the mythical Apple tablet/chalice) it would seem there just *might* be room for both approaches; simple, cheap, dedicated readers that can go weeks between charges and expensive do-everything devices that go hours on a charge.

We all have diffetent needs and preferences, you know…