Another Ebook Availability Check

It’s been a couple of months since I checked the availability of my books as ebooks in Australia. I was hoping to find that missing books had finally been ‘fixed’ but didn’t really expect to see any changes. Well, it turned out there were changes, but almost none for the better.

Amazon – All books except Voice of the Gods

iBookstore – All books except The Black Magician Trilogy, Priestess of the White and Voice of the Gods

Kobo – All books except Voice of the Gods (but look under “Canavan” not “Trudi Canavan”)

Angus&Robertson – All books except Voice of the Gods

Borders – All books except Voice of the Gods

Dymocks – No books available

eBooks.com I have no idea what’s going on here. There are multiple listings of the same books, some in US dollars, some with ‘not available’. There doesn’t appear to be a way to tell it you’re an Australian customer.

In summary, Priestess of the White is now available on the Amazon US site, but that’s the only good news. The only book of mine published by HarperCollins Australia that’s still available in iBookstore is Last of the Wilds. All six books by HarperCollins have disappeared from Kobo. The eBooks.com site is so confusing that if there’s no improvement by the next time I do one of these checks, I’m going to remove it from the list to save customers a headache and disappointment. I’ve taken Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble Nook off the list because the sites won’t let you buy books from Australia. Which goes to prove that the ‘if it appears on the site it’s available’ advice is wrong.

Why has the situation has got worse, not better? Well, it could be any one of the reasons I dug up when researching this post.) Books ‘fall off the system’. Publishers are too busy to monitor every one of the thousands of titles they publish, especially when the book can be there one moment, and be gone the next. Ebook retailers are handling millions of titles as bulk stock and won’t notice (or care) if a couple slip off their site. Authors are too busy writing the next book to be monitoring their ebook titles and don’t want to take up too much of their publishers time – especially when they seem to be constantly under siege these days.

So if you’re in Australia or New Zealand and have been trying to get hold of my books as ebooks, I sympathise with your frustration. Be assured that the digital rights of all of my books in all english territories were sold years ago. All we can do is wait until someone sorts out whatever technical glitch is making them fall off the system.

Oh, and buy more books, so the publishers have the money to pay someone to chase these things up!

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Once again, I must add that I am not interested in a debate on pricing. That’s a topic for another place and time. To keep any feedback to this post on subject I won’t be approving whiny complaints about the cost of ebooks. The purpose of this post is to keep Australian readers informed on where they can buy my books as ebooks.