Yesterday I wanted to buy an ebook that Steve had recommended. Ebook sounds great indeed, you can buy it from the comfort of your home, download it right away and start reading - or so I thought. It actually turned out that ebook licenses are handled extremely restrictively. You need to be physically in the US or Canada if you want to buy from Amazon.com huge inventory, if Amazon detects your location is outside the US they won’t sell you the ebook. I coudn’t even fool them when I used a VPN tunnel that makes my computer appear to have a US IP-address.
Amazon.de (Germany) does not sell ebooks at all. The biggest German ebook retailer does not have any of the (foreign) ebooks I was looking for. Apparently the ebook market in Germany is growing very slowly. The people there told me that ebook licenses are normally only granted for sale in one country. Furthermore DRM software makes it impossible to have a friend buy it for you in the US and then ship to you. After this experience I am a bit disillusioned. I hope the publishers find a way to resolve this and make content globally available. The experience with ebooks is the same with purchase of music MP3-downloads which are also restricted to specific countries. I thought the internet would make it easier to access media, well, not always…
Friedemann