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Waterstone's has stopped selling e-books to customers outside of the UK and Ireland in order to comply with the legal demands of publishers regarding the territories into which it can sell digital titles.
Waterstone's spokesman Jon Howells said the stop had been very recently brought in and had come into force last week. "It is basically due to rights of controlling where we sell books to," said Howells. He said from now on customers will need to have a UK billing address in order to purchase e-books. "This is not a temporary move," said Howells.
A letter sent out to customers said: "We regret that as of 20th October 2010, we are no longer able to sell e-books to customers placing an order from anywhere outside of the UK and Ireland. We have had to take this action to comply with the legal demands of publishers regarding the territories into which we can sell e-books."
The letter states that previously purchased e-books will not be affected by this and will still be available from online accounts.
This move comes after an exclusive investigation by The Bookseller into territoriality controls on Amazon. The Bookseller managed to crack Amazon's territorial controls and buy 10 US Kindle editions of titles. Publishers called territoriality on the online retailer "on the verge of non-existent".