Slashdot Mirror
eReader.com Limits E-book Sales To US Citizens
An anonymous reader writes "eReader.com seems to have begun applying distribution restrictions to its library. I first noticed that there was a FAQ page about distribution restrictions this morning. When I tried to order a few books this afternoon I simply couldn't — a large banner on the order confirmation told me the books had distribution restrictions. I checked a number of titles but it seems a large number of books are no longer available to non-US citizens like me. It is interesting to note that this policy change got implemented shortly after Barnes&Noble purchased Fictionwise. I have no idea if the new owners are behind this new policy but it seems crazy to restrict sales of ebooks. I've bought dozens of ebooks from eReader the past 4 years. I still have 15 dollar store credit but cannot buy any of the books I am interested in." (Right now, the link that should display these new geographic restrictions returns an error message that says the page is being updated.) Sounds like Barnes & Noble is taking its cues from Apple.
(Right now, the link that should display these new geographic restrictions returns an error message that says the page is being updated.)
Well, they still have their (what I assume to be their old) Geographic Restrictions page here up and it says:
We are legally bound to restrict sale of titles that have these limitations to the allowed countries. If we did not, we would lose the books and nobody would be able to buy them from us. We don't like it any more than you do, believe us when we tell you that. It causes us not only to lose sales, but also to get complaints from customers, and we like to keep our customers happy.
I don't think they're taking a cue from anybody, they're just following distribution laws so they don't lose their license to distribute ... and possibly face a lawsuit. Once you get big enough, you become a target. I wouldn't blame eReader or B&N ... blame a shitty distribution system.
My work here is dung.
I don't see why a company should have to sell things to other countries. Despite the internet being free, things contained on the internet do not necessarily have to be geographically free. It reduces the amount of time, energy, and money they might have to spend on lawyers looking up various countries copyright claims, and their market may primarily be based in the United States. Of course, in time this might change, but I'm not one for forcing companies to do things some other way. I'll just buy from another company. Capitalism wins in the end.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
Outdated contracts based on a pre-Internet view reduce company's profits yet again.
Why can't I view youtube videos to follow at 11.
It looks like someone fixed the massive flaws that have come to define slashdot, and has introduced some possibly useful features. It's too really to know for sure.
Nah, it's similar to the real reasons for Region Code restrictions in DVDs.
By limiting the scope of distribution and introducing products into different markets at different times, big publishers can manipualte the market to get bigger profits.
The price a market in another country pays might be a lot higher. If they could just buy from overseas distributors (i.e. in the US), those profits would go away.
They're not restricting sales to US Citizens. They're restricting sales to US residents (presumably people who have an account with a credit card billing address in the US).
Half the point of digital distribution is that prices can be set globally, and for the most part, companies can choose their per-unit profit and let the whole world deal with it. If that price ends up higher than a competitor, the competitor has a chance to get higher sales volume. That free market competition is in the spirit of capitalism.
Sam ty sig.
If I ever write a book, you can damn well bet I won't sanction distribution in Britain.
International law is an absolute clusterfuck, especially where IP is concerned. There's really not much to be done. Of course, it would be nice to get rid of region coding and other such bull, but it's here to stay.
Have you been living under a rock these last few years? "Everybody else" already has been forced into socialism: it's called a "bailout".
We must gain superiority as a nation by trying to limit literacy in other country's. Next we will be changing our subtitles to a made up language and export them. Thank that world!
It is because most non-US people are foot-loose and fancy-free with distributing copyrighted material. That is, you are all pirates.
So really, you brought it on yourself by assuming that just because you chose socialism in your country, everybody else has to be force into socialism too.
Pirating copyrighted material is capitalism. Regulating distribution of copies (or any sort of regulations whatsoever on a market) is anti-capitalist. Neither is socialist.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Without the Asian business, they are cutting themselves out of the manga and hentai market.
Which is it? (Do you have any idea what the word "citizenship" means?)
An author sells rights to publish his/her work to different publishers in different countries, and there's often either legal protection or trade agreements to prevent parallel distribution of editions from other regions.
So, a book might be published by Doubleday in the US but by Pan MacMillan in Australia, and the major book chains in Oz wouldn't carry the Doubleday version (some specialised genre bookshops might.)
This is almost certainly Fictionwise/ereader just catching up with the requirements placed on them by the publishers who provide their ebooks, possibly because the B&N purchase put them above the radar a bit more.
Time to expand governance beyond the archaic system of nation-states. http://metagovernment.org/
I _really_ hope that is sarcasm.
Canada is not a communist country, y'know.
With matters like these, fortunately, the solution is very simple
Here it is:
http://thepiratebay.org/
Here you have a case where you are willing to pay for a legitimate product but you are unable to acquire it due to arbitrary and pointless restrictions.
It's the same sort of problem as DRM. Region locking, device locking ... primarily serve to piss off customers. So go wild.
(When you CAN legitimately purchase the product you desire, of course, piracy thereof becomes a totally different matter).
I'm sorry to say that the intellectual property tycoons have won the war of artificial scarcity. It's nonsense to restrict the sale of bits, but they seem to have been able to buy laws in most civilized countries that enforce their obsolete business model. For the normal people like us, there's only one recourse: STEAL THE BOOK.
I was actually referring to the likes of russia and china, well known for hosting scammers as well as being the origin of many botnet attacks.
I got an email today from FW which is probably relevant to the timing of the implementation:
Given that the Tolkien estate has a LOT of expen$ive lawyers to feed, the conclusion is left as an exercise for the Slashdot readership.
Capitalism only wins if there are neither artificial or natural monopolies (and one could argue that with books it is certainly often the case) or artificial barrier to competition like DRM to implement region encoding. There is no reason whatsoever to have something like BITS limited to a region of the globe, except to artificially limit the market.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
+1 truth.
Kids need to learn what the terms they throw around actually mean.
Homeland security would be interested in the magical technique they have for telling apart a US Citizen, a Legal Resident, and an Illegal Alien given they all have US mailing addresses, credit cards, an so on...
Wasn't the Internet supposed to break down physical barriers like distance etc.? Things like this really start to piss me off.
I am also a non-US person and the hoops we need to jump to to get stuff is unreal. I don't get it either... If we buy stuff over the Net in the US, the producer of the goods/services still get their share, so why must I wait 1 or 2 years before the material is available in my country?
O well - there will be a way to circumvent this shortly. I'll just add to my ever growing list :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
By limiting the scope of distribution and introducing products into different markets at different times, big publishers can manipualte the market to get bigger profits.
Or rather they believe they can. It's quite possible that doing this can result in less total profit. Because people who can't buy the whatever get it by other means. In the past these means tended to include books being smuggled in tourists' luggage.
The price a market in another country pays might be a lot higher. If they could just buy from overseas distributors (i.e. in the US), those profits would go away.
Many times people will not "shop around". Especially if there is a local supplier.
The other thing is that such price fixing often involves bending, if not breaking, laws.
Canada is not a communist country, y'know.
not according to This
Copyright, Trademark and Patent laws are all forms of property rights.
That they are artificial property, as compared to real property (real estate), is interesting but otherwise essentially irrelevant.
What matters is like all real property, these other property rights are national, not international, in scope.
Copyright exists in one nation, and is created by an act of law and under the laws of that nation, alone.
For residents of some other country, the copyrights reside with some other entity (which is to say that entity might be the same, but it's an instance of owning two things by the same party, not the same thing by the same party).
There might be treaties, there might be agreements, there might be a lot of things, but the copyrights are sovereign things and are the business of the soverign authority. They cannot move across borders anymore than your acre of land can move across a border.
This is just a simple drawing back from a technically illegal sales model to a system of perfectly legal sale. Can't blame them.
It is because most non-US people are foot-loose and fancy-free with distributing copyrighted material. That is, you are all pirates.
So really, you brought it on yourself by assuming that just because you chose socialism in your country, everybody else has to be force into socialism too.
Thanks, good sir. You made me laugh and smile on an otherwise dull morning :)
Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?
I also can't buy Bose headphones from Amazon, since Amazon.com won't ship to Europe, and Amazon.de doesn't sell them. (Didn't actually try Amazon.co.uk, but you get the point.) I can buy those headphones from local electronics shops though. I assume the reason that Amazon.com won't ship them is that Bose has distribution agreements with European companies, and Amazon.com didn't think it was worth the effort and/or expense to secure those distribution rights. (Although it would be nice if they would give you pointers to affiliates who would ship to your address, rather than just saying they won't do it.)
I completely agree with the posters who complain that it's inconvenient, but if you see a product that has value, and is not available in some particular market, then it probably wouldn't be hard to set up a business, sign a distribution agreement, and start selling. Don't blame a company that has chosen to focus their marketing and distribution efforts on a market smaller than the entire world, blame the lack of local initiative (or the lack of local demand) in your country of residence.
I am not a Citizen yet, but I am a legal resident of the USA. Would they sell to me? Do I have to quote the number onf my green card, or my social?
Which is exactly what i do.
None from RIAA/MPAA and the Book Publishers Association have truly realized that the Internet is a blessing for them.
They STILL fight it because:
1) They still think in old terms: shipping of CDs, books hardcover and paperback etc. as a way to calculate sales.
2) They still think regional agreements with publishers is essential to control price: which is why you see two prices in Playboy's back: USD and Canadian Dollar (twice as USD)
3) They still hope the internet thingy goes away or is controlled by the Government, so that these morons can decide what people can read/listen/see when these morons decide the date & time.
The same was applied when Movies came out first and started destroying roadshows and plays performed on streets. And how Records started mauling Live Concertos. These Live dumbsh1ts started controlling Records and Movies by limiting geographical distribution.
Which is exactly what today's RIAA/MPAA/etc are trying to do.
And which is bound to fail ultimately.
Only a few companies have recognized the ultimate distribution media. Apple did that, but is hobbled with its stupid agreements with RIAA which prevents me from using an India-issued Credit Card for buying Music from iTunes USA store.
So what do i do? I download it via torrents or from Russian site.
Who's the loser? Not Me.
Same with books and ebooks. Some stupid publishers STILL try to limit the ebook mobipocket version i can buy.
What do i do? Download from RS or ML.
When iam willing to pay for a legal content and these morons refuse to take the money, i don't accept their artificial restrictions: i get them for free.
ImpulseDriven and Stardock are two progressive companies. I bought Gal Civ II and Political Machine 2004/2008 the moment it was launched. Why did i buy them? BECAUSE Stardock allowed me to buy them.
Not because it did not have DRM (although it was a factor), but because stardock realized that selling people what they wanted is MORE important than artifically restricting their distribution...
Way to go Stardock: which is why i bought my Company of Heroes Tales of Valor from them, instead of Steam (steam doesn't allow me to use Indian cards).
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
That's the same link as the original (gp) post.
So if you're living in the US on a work visa, you're still not allowed any e-book goodness? How do they verify that you're actually a citizen, and not some foreign ne'er-do-well with a US bank account/social security number/other credentials?
I'd like to point out that Apple was doing it by provable residence in a region, (i.e. you need a US address to use the US store). B&N is supposedly doing it by Citizenship? So if I am a US Citizen living in Iran, technically I can buy from B&N but not apple. If I am a German in the US, I can buy from Apple but not B&N.
It seems very strange to use Citizenship as a bar - how do they test for that exactly? "No, you only have a green-card, no book for you!" I think that has to be wrong.
The BBC has inane restrictions on purchasing its online content anyway. Leaving piracy as the only way to get Top Gear in a timely fashion.
With real property I can pay to have it shipped from another country. I can even do this with semi-real property (half real property, half IP) like DVDs and books. If the seller can ship IP thru the mail why cant they ship it thru the tubes?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
...and give your ebook away for free!
My web domain.
Bzzzt!
This sort of distribution protection actually promotes world literacy. Think about it:
A book on C costs £27.94 on Amazon UK, and $55.77 on Amazon US. At bookshopofindia.com it costs $7.38. That's more expensive relative to the Indian wage, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to a US or UK citizen. If there was no geographical restriction on distribution (ie if we had "free trade" of books) no bookshops would buy the US or UK version, instead importing the Indian version. This would mean profits would collapse, and Kelly and Pohl, the authors, can't afford to live on Indian wages.
So Kelly, Pohl and their publisher Addison-Wesley would simply refuse to allow the Indian version to be printed -- if the UK/US edition was the only one available, profits in the core market would be protected. The lost profits in the Indian market would be small change.
If we go further afield, to the ex-British colonies in Africa, A Book on C probably retails at about a dollar, and that's more than a day's wage already. Free trade of books would quite literally remove that sort of book from their bookshelves. Education would suffer.
Yes, geographical IP protection is an unnatural intervention in "the market", but it is to meet the reality of wage disparity. We westerners benefit greatly from maintaining this wage disparity (cheap Chinese goods wouldn't be cheap if the Chinese workers got paid the same as us!) and so it is in our favour to use differential pricing of IP to try to foster an illusion of equality.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
i was just thinking that if you had a friend in a non-banned country, they could send you a pre-paid credit card...
i dunno - maybe?
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
With attitude like this the only thing we - all other people on Earth - can do is download off the "Pirate Bay" and other sites like this. Region lockings and limitations like this one are insane, especially now with worl being interconnected. Someone, who thinks digital content can be limited to a teritorry is so detached from reality of Internet it is pathetic.
And btw in case you haven't noticed there is much more people elsewhere than in the US - interesting that US companies fail to notice that. But that has its advantages too. For example, Amazon Kindle is not available outside the US, which means alternatives will be developed and entrenched before they will get their act together to move to new markets.
Several months ago when the Canadian dollar was at par with the American dollar Canadians started looking at the things they were buying and realizing (that for certain items) that they were paying way too much compared to their friends to the south.
The two big things on the list were Magazines and books. Even when you took the old Canadian dollar value into account, it still didn't add up to the amount we Canadians were being charged. (I had even seen Canadian written books, published and produced in Canada being sold for 40% more than the listed American price).
So, naturally, Canadians started getting pissed off and demanding that retailers sell the item to them at the listed US price. Many retailers were happy to oblige.
Publishers, on the other hand, weren't too fond of the events that were transpiring. Within a few months they had started replacing the books and magazines on the shelves with ones with adjusted pricing.
And by adjusted pricing, I mean, books and magazines with the American pricing removed so Canadian consumers wouldn't be able to see the difference in price.
I don't see anything that discusses bias against citizenship, but rather on what country you reside in.
I think you mean US resident, not US Citizen.
Nothing to see? It's an excellent, real example of broken copyright laws not only hindering the spread of knowledge to the developing world, but at the same time, arbitrarily restricting the income to authors and distributors.
These are the kind of stories that can make non-/. types actually think critically about the usefulness of copyright.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
So, what about expat's, ie, US Citizens living abroad?
Is there a way to access the "restricted content" from abroad, for such a person?
PS When will the Internet cause all of these restrictions to evaporate, already?!?
No country is purely capitalist : They turn into a dictatorship very quickly
No country is purely socialist : They turn into a dictatorship very quickly
"Piracy" is not a crime that is punished in some countries simply because they do not have copyright
Copyright is a limited monopoly to encourage innovation in a capitalist system, it makes no sense in a purely socialist country
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
How is bailout any different than everyone collecting on their FDIC backed accounts? When the FDIC goes bankrupt, who do you think is going to cover those accounts?
When I lived in the UK I accessed US iTunes via my US-bank issued Mastercard. I know others that wasn't possible but I continued to do it from 2004-2007. Maybe it will be the same for this product.
There are anti-discrimination laws that prohibit certain types of businesses from withholding goods or services from people based on race, national origin, and in some cases country of citizenship. In some cases such as emergency medical care the laws even prohibit discrimination based on legal-visa/expired-or-no-visa status.
These deal mostly with brick-and-mortar places, it would be interesting to see if courts find that they apply in the online world.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I keep trying to find e-books online to download, but I never can. None of the books I want to read seem to be available on any of the big torrent sites :(
Now you Americans can get a taste of what Canada sees when we want to use hulu.com, pandora.com, Amazon MP3, or a myriad of other online services that are USA-only for no reason other than to pander to big media.
The only reason why Apple changed its policy is because they were sued by the European Commission. If there's one company that has a history of trying to lock people in, it's precisely Apple.
Title says US Citizens, summary says Non US Citizens
But the webpage referenced makes it clear that those affected are actually Non US Residents.
Love the anti Apple crap. No they are being restricted by the publishers of the books moron! Geez, people does no one use critical thinking any more. Have we not taught our children to think?
Why bother
You misunderstand the meaning of "Real Property", and in fact are using the legal description of "Personal Property" in your argument.
" ... In the common law, real property (or realty) refers to one of the two main classes of property, the other class being personal property (personalty). Real property generally encompasses land, land improvements resulting from human effort including buildings and machinery sited on land, and various property rights over the preceding. ..."
In other words, ship the land your house sits on to another country, then. IP is the same in law.
I remember ereader back in the 1990's when I had a Palm, indeed my recent iPhone happily logged in and downloaded from eReader using their own application and retrieved my long forgotten catalog.
I want to pay, now I can't, when are these people going to realise how to do business in the Internet age. All they will do is drive people to illegal means to get the content they want.
Sad day
Keep on refusing to sell to me, and I'll keep on pirating the content. I have no moral obligation to buy what you don't want to sell.
Incidentally, I've never paid for an episode of The Daily Show, even though I was sitting with a credit card in my hand ready to buy a subscription on iTunes a few years ago.
It's been a long time.
Pirating copyrighted material is capitalism.
No it's not, it's copyright infringement. Capitalism is, in purest form, supply and demand (laissez-faire). If the price is too high, demand drops off. If something costs more than you are willing to pay, you do without, and the price drops or the supplier accepts the market price. I.e. it tends to equilibrium. Furthermore, that's what stimulates competition. Economics.
How is breaking the law enforcing capitalism?
I just purchased a book -- I'm Canuck -- no issues...???
iTunes works overseas (it's based on your credit card's billing address), Hulu doesn't.
And you can't break a law that doesn't exist.
... Hollywood, the movie industry the folks that invented different DVD regions in order to control worldwide distribution for maximum profit. In that context it's not a surprising move at all.