Kindle

Surrealean wrote: »

Now, I don't fault the agent; he/she was just repeating policy, though it came out as being ridiculously vague. I'm still clueless as to why I can't buy these books.

My understanding is that it's to do with publishing rights. When you buy a "dead tree" book, you're buying something that's already been published - so there's no hassle with getting the book sent from the .co.uk store.

However, when you buy for a Kindle, you are effectively publishing the title (not shipping) to your Kindle so then you get into a different area. Publishers divide different countries into different territories for a variety of reasons, such as price control. The long and short of it means that different regions will have publications done in different manners (sometimes to the benefit of the author, sometimes not).
It's apparently quite difficult to change existing contracts for some authors to get around this as things such as royalties, etc. would have to be re-examined and maybe re-written. Newer books, and their contracts, are written with this in mind so more should be available to us but we'd still probably come under a different publishing contract than the UK. Therefore, the .com site handles the European publishing contracts.

The territorial region control is not something self-published authors face but some archaic fallout from years ago. I tried to debate this with a few authors on various blogs (which is where my information from above is cribbed) but I've never quite understood how ultimately it benefits them my not being able to give them a sale at all if I'm blocked from all angles.

I'd recommend reading some of Charles Stross' posts on the subject and the comments on them too for further background. There's a particularly good post ( (link), where he discusses writing contracts and mentions ebook territorial rights.

Publishers are addressing this - the selection is much better than it was initially. Many titles from my wish list were initially unavailable - there's only about one now that I can't order due to region control. Hopefully all new titles will not have this issue and publishers can work through the legal loopholes and get the full back catalogues.