My book budget is usually twice as high as my food budget. I am willing to pay for the ebooks. For some very special ebooks I'm even willing to pay hardcover prices. Partly for the convenience of getting them immediately, partly because I don't have room for more dead tree books in my apartment.
Sure, I could throw out some of my older books to get room for new dead tree ones. But my local bookstore doesn't import many english language books. I'd have to special order them and wait a few weeks, sometimes months (there are a few books I special ordered over ten years ago and still haven't gotten). There's a nice SF/Fantasy bookstore about an hour away, but I also want to buy books in other genres.
The question is, why do they have Geographic Restrictions? Do they really think a person in Sweden, or Lebanon or Thailand (since those are the two countries mentioned previously in this thread), is more likely to pirate a bought ebook copy then a person in the US?
Someone told me, once, that it was so that the publisher or author could sell the ebook rights to the book to each country separately. But, surely they must realise that's ridiculous. Maybe it would work with something like Harry Potter or Stephen King, but not with most midlist books. The market for english language ebooks isn't that big in countries that have english as a second or third language.
The publishers are losing money with their restrictions. I'm not going to pirate the books. But I'm also not going to buy dead tree versions of books unless it's an author I already love OR unless I can look at the book in a physical store. And the physical store isn't importing everything. So instead of an ebook sale they get no sale. Is that really better?
SWM wrote:When you are arguing against DRM, you should probably use better arguments.