From now until the end of December we’re running a great sale across all ten of our titles: 25% off your total order when you buy two or more e-books directly from us. Why are we doing this? Well, because we feel you’re wonderful and deserve an end-of-year treat, and also because we’re temporarily suspending direct sales from our website, starting from January.
Wait … what?
The European Union is introducing new rules on VAT for digital products from January. Unfortunately these rules are poorly thought out, and the implementation advice we are getting from official bodies is contradictory. HMRC, the UK tax authority, says if we manually email our e-books out, rather than provide customers with a download link, we won’t fall under the new rules. But the senior official at HMRC says that manually emailing will still fall under the new rules. Then HMRC says we need to register under the Data Protection Act, whereas ICO (which is responsible for data protection in the UK) says that’s not so.
What this means is that we cannot currently be sure what we need to do to comply with the new legislation. We are therefore suspending direct sales from our website as of January 1, 2015, until the dust settles and some clear, unequivocal guidance is available. In the meantime, our e-books will still be available through Amazon and iTunes and when we’re sure of our legal footing they will return to our website too.
For more information on the new EU VAT rules, see euvataction.org.
So please enjoy the sale and pick up some great reads on Taiwan and China. We have some excellent titles coming out in 2015, which is shaping up to be a very good year for new writing about the region.
See our books