e-books for non-uk readers

[anwarne5271]

I'm a Brit living in Spain.  I used to be able to buy e-books from Smiths Waterstones etc.  They now say they cant sell to people with a non-UK credit card address for copywrite reasons - but they can sell me any 'hard copy' book and post it to me in Spain.  I can buy e-books from US and Australian suppliers but not UK ones and some books are only available for sale in certain countries (usually Spain isnt one of them) - but again I can buy the 'hard copy' books without a problem.  Can anyone explain?  Seems crazy to me.:smileyconfused:

[Drumzman · Accepted solution]

Hi anwarne5271,

I'm not sure whether this is 100% the answer, but I think it's all to do with publisher rights in different countries for eBooks.  I think an analogy would be the region coding on DVDs so that certain discs will only play in some countries' DVD players.  It appears that just because a publisher has the rights to sell an eBook title in one country/territory, it doesn't necessarily follow that they have the same rights in other countries.  I'm not sure why this should be different from 'traditional' books, but I'm guessing it's to do with a physical book being just one copy - and one copy is of course physically limited in terms of how much it can be 'distributed' i.e. sold on, lent etc.  An electronic copy I suppose can be duplicated limitlessly, although it does have DRM (digital rights management) built into it to prevent this getting out of hand.  Anyway I'm assuming that retailers have to be seen to be 'towing the line' by not selling an eBook to a country where the publisher does not have distribution rights... thereby infringing copyright I guess!

Enormously frustrating though to those of us who just want to read books, and eBooks are so convenient in so many other ways.:smileysad:

Don't know if this makes some sort of sense anyway!

[Helsing1]

Hi

Have you tried Kobo?  Some of their ebooks (but not all) are downloadable from abroad.

[ayeayecaptain]

Amazon and iTunes, too.   This seems to be a Sony issue, although you can simply log into the US or Canadian store at http://ebookstore.sony.com/ and buy from there... if you know it's there.

There are plenty of suppliers, of course, but I know a couple of people who complain they can't buy my stuff in the UK Sony store.