• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Kindle books and social ramifications

Samson said:
Access to all available books ever written will result in the most advanced social circumstance. And it means the thread is started in the correct section.
Click to expand...

60 million books on Amazon.com.au not enough?

And please show you are not able to access each and every digital book?
 
lionking said:
60 million books on Amazon.com.au not enough?

And please show you are not able to access each and every digital book?
Click to expand...
Thanks, that is the question, are there any books not available? As Darat said there are titles unavailable on UK kindle.
 
Samson said:
Probably wrong section, but Australia and New Zealand are losing access to most of Amazon due to tax changes.
I buy all books on Kindle now, will this be possible by some remote server idea?
Click to expand...

Kindle will be completely unaffected by this change.

ETA: Well, they won't ship you the hardware from their US site, but that's the only change.
 
Samson said:
Thanks, that is the question, are there any books not available? As Darat said there are titles unavailable on UK kindle.
Click to expand...

There are books that aren't available on Kindle anywhere: "Top Five Classic Novels You Can't Read on a Kindle" (www.houstonpress.com). I can't give you a link because I'm in the EU. I just happen to know that The Catcher in the Rye is one of them.
 
Samson said:
Access to all available books ever written will result in the most advanced social circumstance. And it means the thread is started in the correct section.
Click to expand...

That access pretty much already exists.

I’ll be watching for the advanced part..

The question here, appears to be economic, and ultimately social, I suppose..
 
Trebuchet said:
So if I'm understanding this correctly, it's some sort of catastrophe that folks in the Southern Hemisphere will have to pay sales taxes on stuff they buy from Amazon just like I do here in Amazon's home state?
Click to expand...

Not quite, as if I'm understanding it correctly, it's a variation on what already happens in the UK.

If I buy any goods from outside the EU (at present) to a value of greater than £15 (used to be £18), the package can be waylaid by the Royal Mail on behalf of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and I can be charged 20% Value Added Tax (VAT) on the declared value, plus an £8 "handling fee" for that "privilege." This is termed "low-value consignment relief." There is, however, a mechanism that allows the VAT to be calculated/paid before it arrives in the UK. Pitney-Bowes offers such a service for eBay sellers/buyers. In the case of the Channel Islands - which are not part of the EU - retailers there pay VAT direct to HMRC, and their packages are labelled as such, and thus cannot be intercepted by RM "for" HMRC.

Compared to the UK's £15 threshold (pretty much the lowest the EU allows), and as noted in the cited sources, New Zealand's threshold of NZ$400 is eye-wateringly large, as much as the UK's is crashingly low. For New Zealand - and apparently Australia - to seek to recoup "lost" Goods and Services Tax (GST) by seeking to impose its collection on foreign retailers seems a bizarre and potentially unworkable remedy.
 
banquetbear said:
Now imagine if every country decides to do this (and to be frank I can see this happening one day.). Now imagine we aren't talking about Amazon, but a relatively small internet start-up that relies on monthly subscriptions. I use about seven different subscription companies: all of them based overseas, none of them with local equivalents, to help manage my business. If it becomes easier for them to just stop trading with countries that are doing this rather than trying to maintain compliance with multiple tax codes and standards then I can see a lot of them choosing to do exactly that.
Click to expand...
This is effectively already happening. Some people I know publish niche books on vintage TV via Lulu, and they've stopping selling the ebook versions at least to Germany buyers, because the hassle of complying with the rule elgarak mentioned are not worth it.
 
Darat said:
Depends on the publisher, there have been a few titles I've tried to get that were not available in the UK and then you are stuffed as you can only use your local Kindle store.
Click to expand...

And a few books are one Kindle UK that I cannot purchese on the US kindle store.
Probably it's a publisher issue.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Don't know about New Zealand but that link says:
Or it may have made a more calculated decision to punish Australia for its new tax policy to try to dissuade other governments around the world from being tempted to follow its lead.
Click to expand...
i
Click to expand...


Amazon has for a very long time gotten away with paying little to no actual taxes at all. Not only do they not pay the usual taxes, but they have actually gotten tax rebates above and beyond what they have not paid.

Amazon earned $5.6B in 2017, but paid no federal taxes
Trump is right: Jeff Bezos is a genius at not paying taxes
How Amazon gets away with not paying taxes

Aside from this, Amazon does still collect sales taxes in states and nations where it is required to do so. There's absolutely no reason that they could not do so worldwide. What might be a burdenous regulation for small businesses is a minor nuisance for a company the size of Amazon. They are bloody huge, they employ dozens of people for just this sort of purpose, and if they can comply with the disparate taxes and regulations in the US states where they are required to pay them, there's no reason that they cannot do so for Australia or anywhere else as well.

This is not a fight over an undue burden on the business, this is a fight to maintain their ridiculously high profits, and set themselves up as autonomous from and unanswerable to any government's regulation. It's something they've been pushing hard on for decades. They've worked very hard to avoid paying any taxes at all.

Deadrose already made mention of the employee head tax that the city of Seattle, their headquarters, recently implemented. This tax was specifically implemented to deal with the growing homeless population, the highest per-capita in the nation, and the third largest in absolute numbers. What wasn't really addressed is just how much responsibility that Amazon carries for creating that problem in the first place. Seattle's homeless population was stable for many decades, and only just recently saw a huge spike that has shown no indication of lessening.

Is Seattle’s homeless crisis the worst in the country?


The cause of this is two-fold. First, as deadrose mentioned, there's the problem of the massive influx of workers brought here by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other large corporations. These are split between Americans moving here from outside the region, places like California and the Midwest states, and H1B visa holders brought in from overseas, mostly Russia, India, and Ukraine. Literally thousands of such people flooding in over the course of less than five years.

Because of this, housing prices have risen precipitously, and competition for existing housing is intense. But that is not the whole story. The other big problem is where the homeless people come from. A huge percentage of them are those self-same imported people. People who move here for jobs, and end up getting laid off in a few years, or who are living in their cars because they cannot afford housing at the inflated local prices on what they're being paid. Amazon in particular is terrible for this. They have extremely high overtime requirements for their employees, and standards which are really difficult to meet, while paying among the lowest wages in the nation for equivalent jobs. They will lay off large numbers of workers who fail to meet their insane requirements, and import more to replace them.

This puts higher pressure not only on housing, but also on the job market, making it more difficult for those workers to become gainfully employed again, resulting in them losing whatever housing they do have, and putting them in a vicious circle of homelessness and inability to find work.

rjh01 said:
Even that is no problem. There are existing services that will provide a US address, then ship it to Australia. Here is one example https://www.usa2me.com/
Click to expand...


Just FYI, Amazon often blocks or delays orders shipped to these re-shipping services, because of the fraud potential. When I worked doing fraud investigation for them, these services were commonly used to re-direct orders placed using stolen credit cards to blocked regions known for high rates of fraud, such as Romania and Nigeria.
 
luchog said:
Amazon has for a very long time gotten away with paying little to no actual taxes at all.
Click to expand...

...if the goal was to get Amazon to pay "actual taxes" then making them collect GST on behalf of the NZ government isn't the right way to go about it.

I'm GST registered. That means for every 10 dollars I earn for my business I'm obligated to to charge an additional $1.50 that goes to the government. That isn't tax on my profit. Thats money I collect on behalf of the government, put into a separate bank account, and after I offset any taxes from purchases I've made in the month that money goes directly to the tax-man.

My business isn't actually "paying" that tax. My customers are paying it. It does nothing to my bottom line.

And the scale of Amazon's business doesn't change that. The goal of this law change isn't to address loopholes that allow corporate juggernauts like Amazon and Google to structure their affairs to avoid paying local taxes. The goal is to defend local goods and services providers by attempting to "level the playing field." So let's not conflate the fact that Amazon are a bad corporate citizen with the taxes that are being introduced here. I'm no fan of Amazon. But as a small business owner I really don't want to start collecting sales taxes on behalf of the State of Delaware just because I have a customer or two that lives in that state.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom