When I mentioned the Young Wizards series here a time or two in recent memory, one TeleRead commenters complained, “Why can’t we buy them in Canada?” Duane has now posted to her blog that she is in the process of getting ready to beard her publisher about this, and would like help from Canadian readers to gather information.

The problem comes in two pieces. I get reports that:

(a) Canadian would-be purchasers of the YW books from Amazon.com cannot purchase Kindle / .mobi versions of the books from either Amazon.com or Amazon.ca. Is this the case?

(b) B&N.com (which is apparently the only seller of .epub versions of the books)  will not sell Young Wizards .epub books to readers with Canadian addresses. The question I need answered is: does B&N sell any ebooks to readers with addresses outside the USA? If they don’t, fine. HMH needs to find another distributor for ePubs. But if they do, why won’t they sell YW books?

I would be seriously grateful if the Canadian contingent of YW fans would attempt such purchases (don’t complete them, just proceed until they fail — or alternately are about to succeed) and report back in the comments under this message, telling me what happens, so that I have data to take to HMH when I talk to them about this. Please feel free to send screengrabs to verify your experiences. You can send these to our Web lady at lee.enfield.burke@googlemail.com :  please put CANADA in the subject line.

The links to the Amazon.com US-and-theoretically-Canadian Young Wizards ebooks are here:  http://www.dianeduane.com/ebooks-by-Diane-Duane#youngwizards

It will be interesting to see how well this goes. I’ve said before that territorial restrictions are a blight on the e-publishing industry, and Joanna has reported encountering considerable apathy when trying to get ahold of some e-books unavailable in Canada. Hopefully other authors will follow Duane’s example.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Amazon.com gives “This title is not available for customers from: Canada” for all of the books. It is certainly possible to buy many, but not all, books from Amazon.com in Canada.

    barnesandnoble.com website appears to have bugs. For the billing address associated with a credit card, there is a message saying “Billing address must be in the United States.”. However, if I supply a valid US address and press continue, nothing happens – no continue, no error.

    However, it is possible to buy at least 8 of the Wizard books at kobobooks.com – a global company blah blah”.

    Keith

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