At the beginning of the year, I bought a Kindle from Amazon in order to get rid of 2 issues :
- I read quite heavy books, and I read them while walking, holding them with a single hand. Having to support a 1000 pages book really hurts my wrist
- I wanted my books delivered fast, without having to go to the handful of english bookstores in Paris (and their limited stocks), or worse, having to plan a trip to London and coming back with a bag full of books.
The results of this operation have been less than satisfactory, as I discovered soon after receiving the item that most of the books I did read were not on the Kindle catalog (thought I was sure they would be before buying the thing). I was able to download only 2 books on the Kindle (“I am not a serial killer” and “Crowning mercy”).
Yesterday, I discovered why.
As I was browsing the Amazon website, I noticed a Kindle edition of “The Way of Kings” (God, I really need an electronic edition for that one!). Then, I noticed that I couldn’t buy the thing, since there was no buy button. Instead, on the right pannel sat this message :
Don’t you hate it when you want to buy someting and someone won’t sell it to you?
I certainly do! This item sits there on the Amazon website, but I can’t get access to it. So, I dug a little more, and pretended that I wasn’t in Europe anymore. Sure, the “Buy” button appears, but when I use it, this wonderful site tells me that the address stored inside the Kindle indicates that I am not an american resident, so no download, thank you.
They allow me to change those parameters inside the Kindle, they don’t just want to know just what country you’re in, they want a complete valid address. Since I don’t know what will happen if I change this address to a fake american one, I didn’t dare change it, though I was tempted to input Amazon’s own address for this.
So, If I sum-up my situation, I’m a customer willing to pay to have a stupid file downloaded through the internet. I already bought the real book from them, I just want another version that’s more handy to manipulate, so I can enjoy the book on an electronic reader I bought just for that use, but Amazon won’t sell me this file because it has restricted downloads from a region.
Who put those “copyright” restrictions, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m pissed off at Amazon for selling me an item (the kindle) I can’t use, since the supposedly large library is partly denied to me. No, I don’t want to read stupid French novels on it, I want original english ones, and not years after they’re out.
How comes I can order a book, and they will ship it to me in Europe, or I can download the audio version on Audible, yet they won’t let me buy it for download? It makes no sense.
I never could understand this concept of “regional rights”. If I can buy an item and am OK with the state it’s sold in (meaning I don’t mind original versions without subtitles), why prevent me from buying it?
I don’t know what’s so special about electronic versions, but they certainly don’t make things easy for customers.
It seems that the world that was becoming larger by the internet is being segmented by corporations. It’s kinda sad.
After a couple of cons, I now understand that this issue is related to which regional rights were originally bought by the publisher.
For instance, if the author only sold north-american rights for his book to the publisher, when said publisher sells the e-book, the e-book cannot be bought from other places than north america.