Like a football (or maybe a soccer ball)

I've always suspected that the book publishing industry has a logic all its own, and Neil's post about publishing confirms this. He describes how book contracts have divided up English-language publishing into 'territories' that really have little or only archaic relationships to the political territories they correspond to.

For bookselling purposes Australia is normally a UK territory (unless the UK edition doesn't come out within 30 days of the US edition, in which case it becomes an Open Territory), Canada is always a battleground claimed by one side or the other (Good Omens had Canada as UK territory, but all my novels since have had it as US territory)and sometimes it even gets to be Canadian Territory, Singapore regards itself as an open territory and is listed in US contracts as being open territory, but tends to turn up in UK contracts as UK territory (as does most of the Commonwealth and former Commonwealth). Ireland is a UK territory too.

I like how my country gets tossed around between the US, UK and its own autonomous publishing sovereignty when it comes to book rights. I also wonder what difference this makes in price, since it always seems that buying any book in US dollars instead of CDN is always cheaper, even with a favorable exchange rate.

I never buy books when I go home - it's not worth it, even if they're hard to find here, though I did pick up two CDs last trip - the Rush makes #10 (yeah, it's an old one, but we didn't have it) and the Nelly was inexpensive. I hadn't heard any of it before picking it up, but I'm glad I did 'cause I'm liking it even better than her first album. I probably could've gotten them both here, but it was fun to do the browsing on the other side of the border.