On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Gord Sellar wrote:
> But even new, you can get lots of Banks at a place like Chapters or Indigo,
> which are both megabookstore-type places here in Montreal . . . so while
> I'm tempted to ask "Is it just that Barnes & Noble is the enemy of good
> readin'?", I think that's too simplistic a reason. But why is it so hard to
> find in the US and yet not so hard in Canada . . . or, at least, in
> Montreal?
For reasons of rights.
Publishers divide up the world, in terms of where they can sell their
books, and the US and the UK are always separate parts; you'll have
books released in one place before the other, books out of print in
one place and not the other, or books that are just never release at
all in one of the two areas. If you look on the back of a British-
published book, you'll probably see near the price listing "Not for sale
in the US"; large-scale importation of British books into the US is,
or was, forbidden. Small specialty stores will have them, and I used
to see a few at Borders a year or two ago but that seems to have stopped.
Canada is somewhat of a complicated case; since what US publishers tend
to get are "North American rights", you can get US editions, but either
because you're a smaller market or because you're in the commonwealth or
for some other reason I can't think of, British editions also can legally
be imported in large quantities, perhaps only in cases when there is no
US edition currently in print.
So, no, you can't blame this on bookstores in the US, fashionable as it
may be to attribute all the ills of the world to Barnes and Noble.
--
Andrea Leistra [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If we could put a man on the moon, why can't we do it again?
