Quote Originally Posted by Quild View Post
I find it unequal. I did not realize at all that it was your very intent to inflict a different pricing depending of location.
It is unequal, but it's unequal in ways that I can't fix. I can't change the USPS shipping rates to Europe which are utterly ludicrous. I can't ask Ookoodook to open a warehouse in Europe because they are a three-person company that is struggling to pay their existing warehouse rent, and even if they could manage that it wouldn't help for customers in, say, Australia. The price of the book itself is the same for everyone, and it's out of my control that the worldwide shipping network works the way it works.

The truth of the matter is, I am a very small company. Ookoodook is a very small company, too. We are not international corporations and we do not have the resources to muscle our way through the infrastructure that underpins global shipping. We are American companies serving (mostly) American customers, and while it's great and wonderful that so many overseas readers love my work and want to read it, we can't put ourselves into financial distress in order to serve them at the same level of convenience that Americans get naturally as a result of geographic proximity. It is not our intent to inflict different pricing depending on location; it is our intent to stay afloat, which requires that we inflict different pricing. We can't absorb worldwide inequality into our operating budgets.

And yes, when one chooses not to order because one doesn't want to be the US Postal Service's customer at those prices, that is totally fair. I understand and sympathize. It's the next step—where one decides that because they made that decision they then have the right to pirate my work anyway—that I object to. If one is not willing to pay the USPS prices on principle, then they should stand on that principle and live without the product. That's how principles work.