Ebook Availability

I've been wanting to find out how hard it is to buy eBooks of my books for a while now, so I've been doing some investigation. First I checked my contracts. Sure enough, all eBook rights for all books in all english language territories have been sold. That means it's all out of my hands, and responsibility falls down (or goes up) the line to the publishers and retailers. Here's which publishers own which books:

Australasia:

HarperCollins Publishers Australia hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy and Age of the Five trilogy.

Little Brown hold the rights for the The Magician's Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.

UK (Commonwealth minus Australasia):

Little Brown hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy, Age of the Five, The Magician's Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.

US (and most of the rest of the world):

HarperCollins Publishers hold the rights for the Black Magician Trilogy and Age of the Five trilogy.

Little Brown hold the rights for the The Magician's Apprentice and the Traitor Spy Trilogy.

Hunting around the internet, I sighted (based on the cover art) editions of all of my books from all territories, so it looks like the publishers have their act together, when it comes to producing them. However, when I hunted around the retailers' sites, things got a bit odd.

I started with Amazon.com. If you search under 'books' and my name, you'll find Kindle editions using the HarperCollins US cover of my first two trilogies, but when you click on them you get the HarperCollins Australia covers. (Buyers may want to note: The Novice doesn't come up as an eBook under this search string, but if you search under 'Kindle Store' and my name it does appear.)

However, only the second book of the Age of the Five trilogy, Last of the Wilds is available. Not the first. Not the last.

On the Amazon.co.uk site different searches produce different eBook covers as well. If you search in the 'Kindle Store' you get only the UK versions. Search under 'books' and you can find the US covers, but when you select Kindle Edition it switches to the UK cover. Thankfully all of my books appear to be available (though only to UK customers, I assume).

Apple's iBookstore only has Last of the Wilds and The Ambassador's Mission. Kobo only has Priestess of the White and Last of the Wilds.

I have no idea why these big retailers don't stock all of my books.

Most frustrating of all to me, as a customer, is that none of these sites indicate if any of the books are available to Australian customers, and I don't want to have to sign up to Amazon or Kobo and attempt to buy my own book to find out. Territorial rights issues are not going to go away, so retailers really ought to be giving customers this information so they aren't completely put off by the eBook buying experience.

A great example of this is a US based site called eBooks.com, that does stock all of my books. Each book entry has a "For copyright reasons, this ebook is only available to customers in this list of countries" link so you can check if it's available. However, it lists The Magician's Apprentice and The Ambassador's Mission as available only in the United States, which is odd because those eBooks are produced by Orbit and had a worldwide release so there should be no territorial issues. I'd assumed this was because the site had a general policy of only selling within the US, but to my amusement I found that you can buy all of my other books from huge list of countries outside the US. You can buy my books if you order from Afganistan, Haiti, Bangladesh, China and Somalia, but not Australia. Still, it's nice to know people in these countries can order my books as eBooks if they'd like to.

To research availability for Australian version of my eBooks, I tried a few local online stores (Angus & Roberston, Borders) and was disappointed to see how few of my books were available. I found only two books from my second trilogy on one site, and one on the other. I expected they'd at least have The Magician's Apprentice and The Ambassador's Mission (no territorial issues, blah blah).

So, while I started with one set of questions, I now have a whole new set of questions:

Can customers in Australia buy eBook version of my books from Amazon.com, iBookstore and Kobo? Has anybody managed to? Let me know!

Why aren't Australian online stores stocking the eBooks of my books?

Why isn't the full set of Age of the Five available on Amazon.com, when it is on at least one other US based eBook site?

I will try to find out the answer to these questions, but what I can tell you, if you're having trouble getting hold of my books as eBooks, is that they should be available. I don't know why retailers aren't listing all of my books, but hey, if customers start demanding a product a seller is crazy to not do something about stocking it, right? If you want it, ask for it.