The Sword and Laser discussion

I'm sure I am not the only one that, because of the way the world works, has had to move from one country to another a couple of times. This brings up all sorts of challenges and adventures. One of the biggest complications, at least in my experience, is dealing with your amazon account and devices. You want to make purchases in country X (where you currently live, and they don't speak English in X), but your kindle is registered to country Z, and your audible account is set for country Y (where you lived briefly and fortunately was an English speaking country, so the audible selection is good).

How do you all manage this juggling of location and identities? What advice do the itinerants of Sword and Laser have?

Simple: As someone who mostly reads English language sf/f* and who doesn't live in an English speaking nation, I don't deal with ebooks that aren't "region free" in general and not with Kindle/Amazon at all, for mostly this reason.

I also live less than 5km from the border and my "neighbours" having an vastly more expansive Netflix catalogue, for example, for the same price irks me more than a little.

Or that time I wanted to "rent" movie on my phone while I was abroad but couldn't because my phone was apparently of the wrong country according to the app.

You can work around most of those things with proxies and other setups, but I'd rather just not spend money on the media at all at that point. I'll just go do something else. More and more companies are cracking down on that sort of thing nowadays anyway.

"Global market" ... pffft.

*It's the only other language I'm fluent enough in to read books in, and our domestic spec fic market is barely existent (and most of what's there is YA PNR, and that's not my thing) and seriously lagging behind on translated works.

ETA:

/rant.

Sorry that probably wasn't very useful as far as advice goes. :p

I have an old keyboard kindle, and I have been told repeatedly that, unlike newer kindles, it does *not* erase your downloads off it if you unregister it from one amazon account and re-register it to another amazon account. However, this is hearsay, as I haven't tried it out yet.

I also end up "pirating" a lot of stuff off the internet that I have previously bought legally but suddenly cannot peruse anymore. For example, I used to live in New Zealand, and bought a lot of DVD's there. My multi-region DVD-player broke, and I got a cheap regular one in Germany, but in order to play the NZ DVDs I have to reset the region on the player, which I can only do 6 times or so before it gets stuck. If I leave it set to the NZ region, I can no longer watch German DVDs unless I change the region setting again. I also have DVDs I bought in the US (3rd region) and in Hongkong (yet another region). Very annoying.

It all has to do with the publishers negotiating different rights with different deals to different suppliers, which makes it difficult to enable "region-free" content. Same with your Amazon accounts, I suspect.

I end up "stealing" stuff I legally own, because the copy protection punishes legitimate users.

I try to buy DRM-free when I can, but if a book has it, I remove it before doing anything else.

As mentioned above, there are always proxies.

I'm curious now, do the various book bundles have geography based restrictions?

Well, I'm not an e-book buyer so I can't comment on that. I buy physical books almost exclusively. Movies and music though... the DRM is an industry problem.

Drives me crazy because I see stuff on Amazon.uk that I really, really want but can't buy because I have a US address.

I haven't tried it, but my understanding was that on Kindle, at least, you could actually change your country of registration (as long as you had a valid UK address, for example), buy stuff out of the UK store, and not lose it when you changed back to your US address?

As far as I know, you can do that, Joseph. I live in the UK but am American and buy from the US site - I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything illegal (though I have to admit I'm not 100% sure about how tax should work, though books aren't taxed in the UK so perhaps it doesn't matter on this end) so I read up on all the rules and it's my understanding that you can switch your countries without penalty (and I have bought from both sites and so far have not had a problem with losing access to anything - though I don't use a proper Kindle, just the app). I do have a valid US address (well, an address a credit card is addressed to) and a valid UK address, though.

Robyn wrote: "As far as I know, you can do that, Joseph. I live in the UK but am American and buy from the US site - I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything illegal (though I have to admit I'm not 100% sur..."

Thanks! I'll have to give it a try one of these days -- if nothing else, The Court of the Air and The Kingdom Beyond the Waves don't seem likely to ever see a US eBook release.

Ben wrote: "I try to buy DRM-free when I can, but if a book has it, I remove it before doing anything else.

As mentioned above, there are always proxies.

I'm curious now, do the various book bundles have geo..."

Humble Bundles does everything DRM free, even their games. Though they're all delivered through Steam nowadays, which is a sort of DRM since you can't play them outside of Steam.

(They have a pretty awesome Subterranean Press bundle up right now, that's crazy value for money.)

What if you make an account in the other region and then have your PC app connect to that account. Grab the books, remove DRM if necessary (depends on whether the publisher put it on there to start), then send to your Kindle.