Throwback Thursday: ISO Mary Stewart – again

Reading Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Heroes Are My Weakness I’m jonesing to read some classic Mary Stewart gothic romances. Yes, she’s a weakness of mine. One of my all time fave authors – ever. I wrote about searching for digital versions of her titles in one of my first Throwback Thursday posts (see: /2014/01/throwback-thursday-iso-some-old.html) and wanted to double check now to see if any of her titles had become available in the six-plus months since that post appeared. They haven’t – at least on Amazon in the United States.

What? Yes, this is one of those times that I’m tempted to purchase a round-trip (or maybe a one-way) ticket to the UK. Go in search of that perfect North Wales cottage and hunker down and write – and read Mary Stewart books on my Kindle that I could then purchase from the Amazon UK website

Forget the Hachette Amazon squabble, I want to know why digital books aren’t available in every country. I’ve seen authors post about this – apologizing to readers for delayed publication dates – but I never thought we’d have an entire author’s work embargoed. Really. I. Didn’t.

I first encountered the non-US availability of a title in one of the Harlequin Medical Romance titles. I really liked the author, liked the series, and was looking to complete my collection. I searched and searched for a non-print version and found that they were available – freely for sale – in both the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Believe me I searched Harlequin websites – everywhere – booksellers in all those countries – and the only way I could purchase this title is if I were not a US citizen, but resided in one of those countries. Totally unfair.

I’d be saying the same thing if I were living in one of those countries and prohibited from purchasing US titles as well. With digitization, reading ebooks is more universal than ever.

So this Throwback Thursday post is throwing out the idea that what’s available in the UK should be available in the US – and vice versa.

Let me know your thoughts and here’s hoping that Mary Stewart’s digitized titles will soon be available in they United States. Until then, I’ll visit OpenLibrary.org to borrow her books. See you there!