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Comment by oemera | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Germany and I have heard from people who have registered their account with a address in the united states and a valid credit card which is also registered to a guy living in the united states. If you can do this you can buy from the american kindle store and you are paying for the same books less money than european customers.

I hope they will get this right without a hack in the future.

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I'm in Pakistan where Amazon doesn't even sell Kindles or books. The way I bypass that is to go to my Amazon account on their website, and set my country as US.

I have been buying books from the American kindle store and paying using a non-US credit card and it works just fine, have been doing so for over a year.

Hmm, I am from Germany, too. I don't have a Kindle, but I use the Android and other Kindle Apps and I have purchased several books and even a magazine subscription using my german credit card (and never gave them an additional address in the states). Also, I can sign into Amazon.com using my german Amazon account, I don't remember when they changed this, but at some point it just worked. I am not going to move to the German Amazon Kindle Store, as for example that magazine subscription is not available in the German Kindle store. To me, that is the real problem at hand (besides the fact that they shouldn't expect you to pay the same amount of money for a digitally distributed version as you would have to pay for the dead tree version, but that's a totally different issue, which has already been discussed a lot).

There's no problem in using the Kindle store from other countries -- you're just paying $3-$5 dollars more for exactly the same thing as you'd get if you are registered in the US.

You can check this by going to the same kindle page with an account with a US-based address, or a proxy in the US. For example, here are the prices for two ebooks, one from .nl and one through an anonymous proxy:

http://minus.com/mbutwbl

As you can see, one of the books is more than twice as expensive from Europe. The same happens with all books in the Kindle store, as far as I know.

And people wonder why bittorrent is so popular.

I think sometimes it's not that people are cheap, it's just that the internet's been out for almost 20 years and these legal barriers that screw the customer don't need to exist.

Say what you like about bittorrent, at least it's egalitarian.

The surcharge has nothing to do with which country's store you use. Users in UK/Germany/Switzerland/Austria (and Lichtenstein?) do not have to pay the extra fee regardless of whether they use .com, .co.uk or .de. Users in other European countries pay it no matter what.

(E.g. your example book shows up as $4.03 from Switzerland).

It works even with a US delivery address in your account that is separate from a possibly non-US billing address. You can simply switch back and forth the country in your profile to optimize for catalog availability and pricing.

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