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Guest Post: Flash! Amazon lists states and publishers for sales tax

(Editor’s Note: The following post originally appeared at Bufo Calvin’s I Love My Kindle blog and is reprinted here with his permission in a generous effort to help maintain my peace of mind during what I hope will be a brief absence due to my hip replacement surgery. –S.W.)

By Bufo Calvin

This is a great move by Amazon!  They have now updated their Help pages to tell you in which states publishers under the agency model are considered to have a physical presence:
This is an excerpt from the page:
  • Hachette Digital, Inc.: AL, AZ, CO, CT, DC, HI, ID, IN, KY, LA, ME, MS, NC, NE, NJ, NM, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI and WY
  • Harper Collins Publishers, LLC: All states other than AK, AL, AZ, DE, HI, MT, NH, NV, OK, OR, SD, VT and WY 
  • Simon & Schuster Digital Sales, Inc.: All states other than AK, DE, MT, NH, and OR 
  • Macmillan: AZ, CO, CT, DC, HI, IN, KY, ME, MS, NC, NE, NJ, NM, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI and WY
Again, basically what’s happening here is that under a new arrangement, you are not buying e-books published by these publishers from Amazon, you are buying them from the publisher and Amazon is just processing the sale.

On Amazon’s product page for the book, it will tell you which publisher set the price…if you live in a state in which that publisher has a presence, and if your state collects tax on e-books, you’ll pay the sales tax when you buy the book.

Those listed are four of the “Apple 5″.  Penguin is not listed there because they have not yet reached an agreement with Amazon.  It’s interesting to me that Workman and Perseus aren’t listed, although they have reportedly reached an agreement with Apple.  They may just not have reached one with Amazon yet.

For more information on the “agency model” that is precipitating this, see this previous post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared on April 7, 2010 in the I Love My Kindle blog.

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