At 12:43 AM 1/5/05 -0800, Weronika Patena wrote: > Hi, > I'm trying to buy a book on the German Amazon website, but I don't know > German... Could someone who does help me? > > I'm getting this message: > > Wichtige Nachricht! > Bei ihrer Bestellung ist ein kleines Problem aufgetreten (siehe unten). > > Dieser Artikel kann leider nicht an den gewunschten Ort versandt werden. Sie > konnen entweder die Versandadresse andern oder den Artikel aus Ihrer Bestellung > loschen, indem Sie seine Stuckzahl auf 0 setzen und dann den > Aktualisierungsbutton unten anklicken. > > What does that mean??
Someone who actually speaks German is probably also writing a reply, but the general idea is that they apologize, but it's illegal for Amazon.de to send the book to the address you have given. You can change the mailing address to one that's in a country where it's legal to sell the book in question, or you can remove the book from your shopping cart by setting the quantity to 0 and clicking the Aktualisierungs button. I've often wondered how a law against importing books could be smuggled past what's left of the Bill of Rights. After hanging around a writers' newsgroup, I discovered that it's very simple: the publisher of that edition didn't buy the right to sell the book in the United States. The copyright on a book is actually a bundle of rights: The right to publish it in North America, the right to serialize it in a magazine, the right to translate it, the right to create derivative works, and so forth. By selling each right separately, the author makes more money because the Italian rights are worth more to a publisher in Italy than to a publisher in New York, and First North American Serial Rights are worth more to Analog than to Doubleday. Which doesn't interfere in your right to buy the book -- but you have to find a way to get it on your own; the publisher can't help by, for example, putting it into the hands of a distributor who markets in the U.S. Shifting from "I have heard" to wild speculation, I imagine that you would have to get the book from someone who bought it outright, not from someone who took it on consignment from a publisher or distributor. And all bookstores take books on consignment; if they don't sell, they return them to the distributor for credit. Or they rip off the covers, return those, and trash the rest. (Hence the "a coverless book is a stolen book" warnings in mass-market paperbacks.) -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where the lake is almost as high as it was before they opened the dam last fall. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
