Having finished The Lies of Locke Lamora I decided to return to TrekLit and continue my Peter David reading list. Next up: A Rock and A Hard Place. I headed to Amazon to get it for my kindle and... it's not available. So I went hunting and I can't find it anywhere. Am I missing something or am I having some bad luck?
http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Hard-Place-Star-Trek-ebook/dp/B000FC0TKE/ ETA: Sorry didn't realized that you were from the UK when posting that link, as it really isn't available on amazon.co.uk for some reason.
Short answer is yes. The book is available for the Kindle in the US but not the UK. Since all your books are saved in their system, you could deregester your UK Kindle, and reregester it with a US account. You'll temporarily loose the books connected to your UK account but you can then buy the book under your new US account and download it. Its complicated so it might be easier just to find it used! ;p
I wonder if in the UK there might be rights issues with it, considering it had been issued by Titan originally. Did Simon & Schuster, themselves, ever do a paper release in the UK?
For what it's worth I did a quick check on the Amazon UK site and found there are used copies available for the price of shipping, so at least there is that as an option.
It was certainly on sale at one point because I put it on my wishlist for easy finding a few months ago, just now I can't buy it.
But who was the publisher of the ebook? I know that here in North America the different rights are seperated, but the UK and EU tend to go with the "you sign one right away, you've signed them all". That's how the UK has managed to get unedited DVD's of "Quantum Leap" and "Muppet Family Christmas", while North America ended up with chopped up versions.
Concerning the EU market - A Rock and A Hard Place is available as ebook on Germany's amazon.de. Why would this one novel be unavailable in the UK, and are there any other ST treks not available as ebooks in the UK?
Not that I can see, and the version in my wishlist has the publisher showing as Pocket books, so no idea why it was suddenly pulled since it's been on sale by them originally.
Oddly it's listed as available as an ebook in the uk on S&S website: http://books.simonandschuster.co.uk.../Star-Trek-The-Next-Generation/9780743420907# though most of the links to where to buy don't work. If you search for it on the hive.co.uk link, though, you can find it. Its an "Adobe digital editions" (...whatever that is...) It's also on iBooks on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/star-trek-next-generation/id381694218?mt=11 I wouldn't buy either of those formats, as I use a kindle, but there it is.
The book was originally published in the UK by Titan, not by Pocket. Maybe S&S realized (or at least believes) that they don't have the rights to sell it in the UK?
Odd. I bought this title on the 28th of May in 2011 from Amazon UK. I see that its not available any more. Reminds me of a stich in time, which I bought from fiction wise circa 2009, but this is not available in eBook format anywhere in the UK now. One advantage to buying things and putting them on my to read pile.
That applied to many ST novels. Titan licensed the books from Pocket. More likely, the UK file developed a corruption and has been pulled for correction. eBook departments seem to run on the smell of an oily rag, so I'm sure it's sitting on someone's to-do pile.
There is an option to create an American shipping address for your Kindle Account. Then sign on to the UK site, go to MYK, then Country Settings. Change your address to your American Shipping Address and you should then get access to the Amazon US Kindle Store. If you then choose to revert to the UK site, your US books will remain part of your library.
Thanks K.J. I might have to try that. Mainly because I decided to skip for time considerations (long story) and jump to Vendetta. Only I can't, because that's not on Kindle either. This one doesn't even have a page that I can't buy from. Only the old paperback. Time to go hunting to see if someone in the UK can get a digital copy from anywhere easily.
I think it's more of a rights issue. From what I've been able to find out, it appears Titan still holds some of the Trek rights. Plus I've seen other S&S series where S&S UK only has the rights to some series, while the other publisher still holds the rights for the other part of the series.