Artificial Regions Redux

It’s now over two months ago that I landed in the US with the idea of doing my job, do it well, and then consider moving here if the job was right. And two months ago I wrote about some stupid limitations of services based on where you were when you registered.

Now, even though I’m not here stable yet, I’m getting there: I have a bank account and a check card, and I have some billing address that I can use. So finally for instance I got access to Amazon’s App Store, which is not enabled even if you’re paying for Amazon Prime, as long as you don’t set your primary form of payment to a credit card (and address) in the US.

This should be easy, shouldn’t it? Not really; as it turns out, once I switched that around, Amazon stopped letting me buy Italian Kindle books…. which sounds silly given that they let me buy them before, and I haven’t removed my Italian credit cards, just not set them as default! Furthermore I’m not stopped from accessing them if I had them before.

The absurdities don’t stop here though; since I now have a check card in the US, I moved my iTunes Store account over… this actually enabled a few more functionalities, such as the “iTunes in the Cloud” and the fact that I can now re-download my purchased music as well as Books and Apps (which is the only two items that can be re-downloaded in Italy), but on the other hand, it threw off the previous purchases, showing all my purchased Apps as not available. While I was neither expecting nor hoping that my previous music purchases were available, I was pissed by the fact that it asked me to purchase again the software, especially things like TeamViewer, which is quite expensive. Luckily Apple’s tech support solved the issue relatively quickly.

So there you move to Android Market Google Play, that actually enabled me access to the US software simply by popping in the AT&T SIM card… well, while they did enable access to the US software, they still thought better to keep me off the Google Play Music store, as I was still registered in Italy. And while at it, when I actually purchased an App there… it ended up being charged in euros instead of dollars — this might sound strange, but it means that you pay more for it simply because the bank is going to ask you extra money for the currency exchange. Technically, the MII should tell them which currency the card is using by default, but instead of relying on that, they rely on your billing address… which they also don’t validate against the bank (as Newegg does instead).

Oh well… at least things seem to be more or less sane by now: most of the Italian books I had in my Amazon wishlist are available through the publishers’ group webshop which also provide most of them without DRM. Looks like Amazon is making it much nicer for everybody to buy eBooks now. Not all of them of course, but it’s still a step in the right direction.. and at the same time I’m very happy with buying them on the Kindle if I’m on the go, as I’m sure they are not going to kick me in my balls like Kobo did with The Salmon of Doubt (which I’m currently reading, after buying it again).