Buying Foreign Kindle Books

[James29]

I am not too swift with technology. I much prefer reading books in Spanish on my Kindle. There are some books available for Kindle in Spain's Amazon store that I would like to buy and read. They are not available in the US's Amazon store. Is there a way to buy them while I am here in the US or do I need to wait for my next trip to Spain? If I have to wait for my trip to Spain, how would I buy the books when I am there? I would still have the same US address and credit card. How does this stuff work?

[Ogrim]

Your Kindle can only be connected to one Amazon account, so I do not think that you will be able to buy on the amazon.es site even if you go to Spain. If you live in Spain, you will have the choice whether to link your Kindle to amazon.com or amazon.es, but it doesn't work the other way round for someone living in the USA. As I live in France, I can choose between amazon.fr and amazon.com, but I cannot buy e-books from amazon.es or amazon.de either. (I can however buy physical books on amazon.es, but then I must pay the shipping from Spain to France.)

I don't know whether it is possible to buy e-books from Casa del libro with a US address and credit card, but maybe worth checking out? I also don't know if books bought there are compatible with Kindle, but they work with Adobe Digital Editions which you can install on any PC, Mac or tablet.

Edit; I should clarify that, living in France doesn't mean I can switch freely between the .fr and the .com sites. I haven't tried, but I suspect that if I changed to the .com site, all my purchases on .fr will no longer be available on my Kindle.

[Brian]

I've experienced similar problems trying to source German e-books on Amazon. Fortunately I go to Germany 2-3 times per year so I usually just buy a few physical books each time I'm there.

I seem to remember Apple Books allowing me to download e-books published in Germany. That might be a solution.

[James29]

In the past I bought Spanish books and had them shipped to me. Used books in Spanish are sometimes cheaper than buying the book on Kindle even when shipping is added (for example, I bought many popular fiction books in Spanish on Amazon for $0.01 plus shipping). I just would now much, much prefer to have books on my Kindle so I can more easily look up words (and it is also much easier to carry around).

[iguanamon]

Without "gaming the system" ala emk and VivianJ5 you are out of luck... and they wonder why people turn to piracy! .

Basically, you can't even buy e-books from Amazon even if you are IN Spain. As Ogrim points out, it's all tied to your kindle account. When I was in Brazil a few years ago, I could buy e-books from the US but not from Amazon Brazil. To illustrate the absurdity, I can't even get a FREE e-book from Amazon Brazil or even order a hard copy without a bunch of stuff that is unique to Brazilians- CPF and a physical address in Brazil. I can order hard copy from Spain and have done so in the past. There's something about reading a physical book and not being able to look up words that makes me better at figuring out things from context, up to a point. That's what I have to do with Ladino and Haitian Creole because there are no kindle dictionaries. Don't get me wrong, I love my kindle and tablet.

[Ogrim]

Without "gaming the system" ala emk and VivianJ5 you are out of luck... and they wonder why people turn to piracy! .

You are right, but although you can blame Amazon for many things, I don't really think this is something they have chosen themselves. At least here in Europe, it is very much linked to copyright/distribution right issues, and the publishers are often to blame. To give you an example, for a long time Norwegian publishers resisted allowing Norwegian e-books to be bought on Amazon or read on a Kindle at all, they created their own, closed solution instead (which was pretty awful). They came to realise that this was a bad policy, and now you can buy e-books on Norwegian sites and send them to your Kindle. And I have no problem buying on Norwegian sites even though I have a French address and credit card.

So the limiation in acces to e-books from the different amazon platforms is linked to these issues. I wondered though why I can link my Kindle to the .com site if I prefer, but not to the .es or .de sites. Apparently this is because the .com is sort of "the mother house". There is for example no "national" Amazon site for Norway or Sweden, so if you are in one of those countries your only option is to buy at amazon.com.

I look forward to the day when there is just one amazon.eu site (with various sub-sites according to language) instead of various national ones in Europe, but I am not holding my breath.

[James29]

I am trying to digest the suggestions and advice here (along with some dated suggestions online). So, I think I could manage to figure out how to change my address in my Amazon account. I could probably also manage to change the registration on my kindle. I could also figure out how to use a gift card. I don't have a clue what a VPN is.

So, if I 1) go into my Amazon account and change my primary address to that of a friend's address in Spain 2) go into my kindle settings and change the registration to Spain and then 3) buy my books with a gift card. Will that work if I am still here in the US?

[iguanamon]

Ogrim is right it's all about publisher's regional digital rights. Have a look at the second response on quora to this thread: Why doesn't Amazon allow a US account to purchase foreign books via Kindle?.

As others have mentioned, the regional nature of book licensing makes this a necessity. Ironically, you can buy a foreign print book much more easily than you can buy a foreign e-book. It has to do with the assumed point of sale. When you're buying a print book, the point of sale is considered to be the warehouse in the foreign country that ships you the book. Since the book is being sold in the foreign country, it's perfectly legal for them to drop it in the mail and send it off to you. ... But when an e-book is sold, the point of sale is considered to be the computer or e-reading device that buys it. So only computers in the country where it's licensed can legally buy it. I still don't understand why they don't consider the server to be the point of sale the way they do warehouses for physical books; I've never been able to get an adequate answer for that. I guess that's just how the laws evolved.

If you do manage to get this to work, it would probably be a good idea to have a second kindle device and a second amazon account devoted solely to amazon.es because, if not, then you'll have the opposite problem of being locked out of the US. Though, the vpn solution is probably going to get harder. Amazon is also one of Netflix's biggest competitors in streaming video. Netflix recently announced (probably to placate content providers) that they would be cracking down on customers using VPN to get around geo-restriction. Here's a description and how to set one up: virtual private networks (VPN). Probably a good idea to search for a less well known VPN because when they start blocking them, they'll be blocking the IP's of the most popular VPN's.

[Arnaud]

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[solocricket]

I hate that the kindle can only be connected to one Amazon store I think that it's really not taking advantage of what ebooks can offer. That being said, I know you can't find specific ebooks you really want, but the US Kindle store has a really big selection of Spanish books. I do most of my Spanish reading on the Kindle. They have a huge number of translated bestsellers, young adult, and children's books, as well as many from Spanish and Latin American authors. Keep looking, and hopefully you'll find something that piques your interest!