The way the world of copyright is set up to gouge each individual market separately is growing costlier and costlier particularly for small far away markets like our own.
I’d love to buy an Amazon Kindle Fire and subscribe to Amazon Prime. But there’s not much point doing the former from Australia (It’s actually difficult to buy the Fire on line from Australia) as one can’t do the latter.
I’ve managed to jump the moat of fortress Australia by subscribing as an American to Amazon books, (I didn’t even use a US credit card) but I suspect it will be harder for Prime and also for downloading movies where I expect the system will detect me downloading from an Australian server and refuse to help – as Apple did recently when I tried to hire a movie at US prices given that Australian prices for the same thing were about 40% (40%!!) higher.
So can anyone offer instructions as to how I might be able to do this. Can one access these services via proxy server which doesn’t give the game away? If so, please feel free to offer detailed instructions in comments.
Whirlpool has a number of threads covering this, e.g.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1443484
mostly they are using it for netflix and US iTunes.
I suggest you do some searches on whirlpool for vpn and/or proxies.
I have also used tunnelbear.com, which is painless and has a free 0.5Gb service so you can try it out. They have a twitter promotion which kicks in another 1Gb free every month. Works for US and UK. I streamed some rugby from ITV during the RWC2011, worked ok. Also tested UK iPlayer, which also worked.
I see they’ve dropped their price to $4.99/month. Hard to go past that.
Just go to the Bit Torrent Video Store and don’t feel bad about it. If the copyright owners wanted to be taken seriously, they would price their product appropriately instead of lobbying to more completely turn the US into a bankrupt police state.
Not hard to buy a Kindle Fire in Australia… I’ve had one for a couple of months now. Best bet is eBay.
The only draw back: the Amazon App store doesn’t work in Australia, and they block the Android Marketplace, although there are alternatives out there. For everything else it works a treat.
YOu need a VPN PPTP service, some of which can be set up from your router. You can choose either a British VPN (for wtaching BBC), or American (for Amazon etc). If you wanted extra security, so you could be anonymous on the web you would choose a more expensive VPN, but I doubt you’d need that in AUstralia.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/02/five-best-vpn-service-providers/ has good coverage.
Yep VPN’s. And there are some commercial services around that will set it up for you via a software download and payment of a service fee, no mucking around with routers.
But some of the US services can detect you even if you’re using them. Hulu is pretty good at that. I don’t know how they do it though, or any way around it.
Getting blocked by Amazon and the like when trying to buy things from the US is what got me to have a look at BitTorrent sites in the first place. I would think this is an own goal by pay-for-content providers.
what Tim said, and buy a pocketbook reader designed in the Ukraine, supports any format you can think of… I’ve an old school e-ink 360
CHM; DJVU; EPUB; FB2; FB2.zip; HTML; PDB; PDF; PRC; TCR DOC; RTF; TXT
priced higher, but no lock in e.g.
http://shop.pocketbookreader.com/PocketBook-e-Readers_c2.htm;jsessionid=D2F01F258785AEA9C1AEFB99CB1C4DEF.qscstrfrnt04
Meika, My main need is for a reader for my Amazon e-books. Perhaps I’ll move away from Amazon if I get too bugged by their closed format, but I’m not sure what openness of format achieves in any case. What I mean by that is that for ebooks to be sold they have to encrypt the content.
So I’m not sure how you can ‘open’ a format without opening up your encryption key. Of course the Kindle is annoying for not being able to read certain standard ebook formats, but if I had an ebook reader that could read the Kindle format, how could it possibly read MY Kindle books (ie decrypt them for me to read?)
Am I missing something? I won’t be surprised if I am.
more broadly, the free program calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) greatly assists in using the kindle in an unlocked manner.
Na, calibre is great in transposing between formats but it doesn’t get rid of DRM. If you want to use your Kindle in unlocked mode then you need to pirate the books, which is yet another example where the pirated product is actually much superior to the one you’re asked to pay for. I have ebooks and other products that I would have really liked to pay the creators for, but these turkeys make it impossible.
I honestly think greed and fear blind these firms to reality.
I’ve had little problems with books…well except when there’s a delay in an Australian book being published in the US on Amazon (like John Birmingham’s latest.) Calibre and some DRM removing tools help there, but it’s not a huge issue as I do tend to read US authors.
Re: apps, @Oliver Townshend here you on that. Have looked at it, and it is something I will try, but it’s not a major issue for me. I mostly use my Fire to browse the web and the Amazon bookstoore. It’s replaced my laptop for my early morning wake up and read things browse before getting out of bed. That said, would like to get some apps and think I would use it more, but I’m not totally complaining.
Have any of you had experience of turning ‘books’ (esspesialy books involving things like pics and poetry) into i.pub format? Have tried a number of programs (such as caliber) and all of them resulted in so many format/layout and ‘drop-Caps’ sorts of errors that it would have been easier to start from scratch .
The format is essentially a extension of XHTML most book editors are not web designers.
Wihch leads to the question: Any recommendations Viz a purpose made WYSISWG editor for i.pub?
Sorry about the errors .. its 14C here and fingers are a bit cold , weird summer.
There are a number of freeware apps to create and manipulate epubs but a little HTML and CSS will goa a long way as epubs are basically websites in a zip file (replace the .epub extension with .zip and you can extract the contents).
People maybe interested in the following article on Apple ebook creator app: Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement
Last winter I creator an ebook on Tasmanian Gutters especially for reading on the iPad but its formatting was too cool, I was cleverly centering the poems on the poems’ longest line and the robot handling my chosen itunes aggregator (bookbaby.com) kept refusing mine entry into that walled garden, so I have, after 20 years foresworn any Apple product.
he same aggregator also released my Tasmanian Gutters into other channels, such as for Ammazon’s Kindle where it reached number 13 on Kindle’s Architecture best seller list. After selling nearly a half dozen copies.
You can also download the epub from here for nothing.
For my next trick I will eradicate lice from your children’s heads. (in a month or so) (in Hobart).
This blog has lots of interesting stuff on self-publishing. http://andrewhickey.info/tag/self-publishing/