Earlier this year I bought a Kindle with the aim of it replacing any paper book purchases with eBook editions. One book I've been wanting to read and waiting for it to be published is The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. The book has been available for a while now in both paper and Kindle editions through Amazon, albeit the Kindle edition hasn't been offered to me due to my "geographic region" (being Australia).

Frustrated by this, I waited till the book was available in Australia and now that it is, I checked back in the Kindle book store on Amazon.com. Still, I'm only able to purchase the paperback version.

So I sent an email to Amazon requesting them how this is so, and herein is their response:

Hello,

Publishers grant eBook rights on a country by country basis, as a result availability and pricing of titles in the Kindle Store can vary by your home country or region. We are actively working with publishers to get the rights to all titles for every country and adding more selection every day.

You'll also find helpful information on our "Using Kindle If You Live Outside the United States" Help page (http://www.amazon.com/kindleinternationalsupport).


We look forward to seeing you again soon.

So there you have it, not entirely Amazon's fault for it not being able to sell me the book but some forewarning would have been beneficial. I'm also suspecting that this issue extends to other eBooks shops as well such as the Kobo eReader distributed by Borders. Sad fact is that whilst the Internet has opened up the borders to free the flow of information, traditional publishers are still putting up hurdles to slow it down, but for how long..