Perhaps what slomacuser meant was that Amazon "won't force sellers to ship outside the USA." That's really too bad. Amazon has control over sellers in many ways, and they could easily force them to sell overseas. If a seller refuses, they simply would be banned from being listed on the Amazon site.
EBAY has the same problem. There have been quite a number of items I wanted to purchase in the past, but the seller just wouldn't sell overseas. It's almost always due to "fear and ignorance." Many people cite "fraud" but in reality there is just as much of that within the US as their is outside it. I should know, I've been in the business of selling electronic products worldwide for nearly 15 years now. I personally have found that so long as you ignore emails from Nigeria and Indonesia and be very cautious about emails from the Philippines and Singapore, you're probably going to have a safe transaction. But we also have the benefit of a very strict credit card check via our bank. We dial up our bank, give them the card information, and they perform an extensive check while we are on the phone. They always catch the bad cards this way. We've never had a case where we've charged money to a bad card. But regardless, there is no such thing as a "risk free business." To avoid international sales due to "fear" or "risk" is evidence that the seller does not understand how to do good business.
Anyway, if any of you have Doug Clapp's Hacker's Bible, please contact me. I know you won't want to part with it, but perhaps we could talk about scanning some pages (for historical preservation purposes, of course).
