25 April 2011

It's the price, not the book, that is not available

I thought I'd pass on an information gem/discovery, because particularly if you are an Australian Kindle owner, this may have also mis-led you.

I have an RSS feed from the blog Books on the Knob coming into my reader.
Quite often, it seems, I can get an alert to a book that looks interesting.
Like this one:

So I clicked on the link for The Janissary Tree and got this page
My eye was drawn to the green block on the right This title is not available for customers from Australia
And that, I thought, is that... again
Until I noticed I could see a price for a Kindle version in the middle.
So I clicked on that and arrived here:
So, now, as you can see, the mystery unravels.
The book is available to me, here in Oz, just not at the price Books on the Knob advertised which must be a price for US customers.

1 comment:

Maxine Clarke said...

It isn't Amazon setting the price. There are two things (at least) going on - one as Kerrie points out the regional rights - publishers divide the world up and sell rights to that region- so the publisher who owns the rights in the region is determining availability. Then there is price - as we all know Amazon began selling e-books when Kindle was introduced very cheaply. Then most big publishers got together and set up a cartel. Amazon refused to sell these books but eventually so many joined the cartel that it had to give in. Amazon cannot (at present) sell the book for less than the publisher who is in the cartel and who owns regional rights determines. But it is trying, eg has taken the publishers to the European Court for alleged price-fixing. I am not entirely unsympathetic to publishers on price as they have to stay afloat, but I wish they did not have regional policies for e-books, which seem daft (I can sort of understand them for print).

(posted on FF as Blogger ate this first time - trying again).

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin