RawToast wrote:

I can't try at the moment (at work) but have a try using VPN Gate:

http://www.vpngate.net/en/

I used it to access the Japanese Play Store and it worked! Thanks!

AkiKazachan wrote:

This might be a bit OT, but why don't they want people overseas buying their stuff? Seems like the us-them dichotomy taken to a whole new extreme..

It's most likely due to licensing concerns, they probably only have the rights to sell certain ebooks within Japan.

undead_saif wrote:

RawToast wrote:

I can't try at the moment (at work) but have a try using VPN Gate:

http://www.vpngate.net/en/

I used it to access the Japanese Play Store and it worked! Thanks!

Thank you so much for this!  I got it to work right away (unlike just about everything else) and now back to my 小説.

Crispy wrote:

AkiKazachan wrote:

This might be a bit OT, but why don't they want people overseas buying their stuff? Seems like the us-them dichotomy taken to a whole new extreme....

Though what do I know about economics? Nothing XP

For the same reason that after 12 months of buying 7-11 they almost drove it to bankruptcy, and the same reason their public debt is over 200% their GDP--Sometimes Japan does things the way Japan wants to do things, regardless if it makes sense or money.

It's not an issue with Japan specifically. In Japan, you can't use US Hulu, Netflix Streaming, or Pandora, and N. America Region 1 DVDs won't play in Japanese Region 2 DVD players, and vice versa. It's why there's different iTunes stores based on the country you live in. Media companies can be very territorial with their licensing and distribution rights. This happens everywhere.

patriconia wrote:

It's not an issue with Japan specifically. In Japan, you can't use US Hulu, Netflix Streaming, or Pandora, and N. America Region 1 DVDs won't play in Japanese Region 2 DVD players, and vice versa. It's why there's different iTunes stores based on the country you live in. Media companies can be very territorial with their licensing and distribution rights. This happens everywhere.

To expand on this, sometimes different companies have contracts with the original media production company to distribute products, items, etc in different regions. This made more sense back in the day (not that long ago, really) before the prevalence of digital distribution of content.

Say, for instance, a book publisher (or record company, or movie company, etc) handled its own distribution within the US/Canada. They would get approached by a publisher or distributor from somewhere in Europe who wanted to sell their book (or they would seek out a distributor) and already had the infrastructure in Europe to distribute: storage buildings, transportation, shipping, etc. The publisher, 20 years later, starts producing e-books (or DVDs or whatever), still has active contracts with these other companies to distribute in different regions. Contractually, the original producer has to honor or protect the distribution rights of their partner company, with which they may now have a historically mutually beneficial business arrangement.

Taxes on goods/sales of content also has an influence. Multi-national companies will often separate things by region (Sony US vs Sony JP, for instance) to minimize charges, taxes, fees, etc.

Distribution of digital content is still in a transition phase, and likely will be for some time, before the wrinkles we see on the consumer end will be worked out.