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[AwakenedCloud]

After graduating from college in the spring, my Spanish skills have unfortunately been on a steady decline. To ease myself back in to the language, I decided to try and pick up the Spanish version of the Hunger Games series for my tablet. What better place to look than the Google Play store?! Or so I thought. After trying a couple different searches such as "Hunger Games Spanish" and "Los Juegos del Hambre", a dark reality started to seep in; I was getting absolutely nowhere.

I tried to Google the problem, only to find that entering Google Play or Play Store before anything returns a bunch of apps rather than actual Web results. The cynic in me says they did this to conceal the issue, but pursuing this train of thought isn't going to fix the problem, so let's drop it for now. After re-wording the query a couple times, I finally got the results I was looking for; unfortunately, all of the answers were less than ideal. As of writing, the only way of getting foreign books off the play store is:

1. Move
2. Get a VPN of sorts and use it
3. Use a root app which fakes the region for you, which may or may not work with the latest version of Android

As you can see, none of these are particularly easy or simple for your standard end-user.


With the amount of people in the the U.S who are of Spanish descent and use it as their day-to-day conversation language, this seems like the craziest oversight ever. Millions of people are trying to learn or maintain their knowledge of a foreign language; grabbing foreign books, music, magazines, and TV are some of the best ways of doing so. In an ideal world, language for books and other digital media would be an option you can select from settings as it is in physical releases of movies, but right now I'm willing to double dip for the sake of learning.

For the most part, all the work is already done. The Spanish and German versions of the store came out earlier in the year. I'm not asking them to merge the stores or anything silly like that, but at least add a category for foreign books or add a setting to let users see other versions of the store. It wouldn't even be that bad if they made users jump through a couple hoops to do so. If there was a fear of breaking release dates by Country, then give the publisher the option to set a temporary region lock before it gets pushed globally. Like any other group, I'm sure foreign book publishers aren't against taking my money. I don't care if I had to keep separate currencies to use between the stores, it's certainly a better option than the current one... nothing.

What say ye, GAF? Why they gotta stop me from learning some Spanish and getting some quality reading time in?

 

[Mindwipe]

The sales would be minuscule, and most of them would be to people outside the territory breaking geo-IP or just pirating it. Plus potential confusion when people buy the wrong language, the fact dubs are virtually never ready at the same time as English language releases and, well, to be blunt it's just virtually always more hassle than it's worth.

 

[Futureman]

are you singling out Google because they are the only ones who don't offer this, or because that is what you are using??

it's probably the confusion factor. 99.9% of sales would be for the language of that region. If there were multiple languages available there'd a lot of hassle with returns.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

It's probably because of regional distribution agreements.

 

[AwakenedCloud]

The sales would be minuscule, and most of them would be to people outside the territory breaking geo-IP or just pirating it. Plus potential confusion when people buy the wrong language, the fact dubs are virtually never ready at the same time as English language releases and, well, to be blunt it's just virtually always more hassle than it's worth.

No matter how miniscule the profit margin may be, it is still a almost guaranteed profit as long as the book has already been translated. The stores could still be region locked by default, but they could give the publisher rights to release their product on the remote version of the store.

I did a little more research and Amazon seems to have a good implementation of a Spanish Store.
Kindle in Español

Originally, I wanted to get all my books from one source, Play, but it looks like the best solution might be to get English ones from Play and others from the Kindle store.

 

[SRG01]

After graduating from college in the spring, my Spanish skills have unfortunately been on a steady decline. To ease myself back in to the language, I decided to try and pick up the Spanish version of the Hunger Games series for my tablet. What better place to look than the Google Play store?! Or so I thought. After trying a couple different searches such as "Hunger Games Spanish" and "Los Juegos del Hambre", a dark reality started to seep in; I was getting absolutely nowhere.

I tried to Google the problem, only to find that entering Google Play or Play Store before anything returns a bunch of apps rather than actual Web results. The cynic in me says they did this to conceal the issue, but pursuing this train of thought isn't going to fix the problem, so let's drop it for now. After re-wording the query a couple times, I finally got the results I was looking for; unfortunately, all of the answers were less than ideal. As of writing, the only way of getting foreign books off the play store is:

1. Move
2. Get a VPN of sorts and use it
3. Use a root app which fakes the region for you, which may or may not work with the latest version of Android

As you can see, none of these are particularly easy or simple for your standard end-user.


With the amount of people in the the U.S who are of Spanish descent and use it as their day-to-day conversation language, this seems like the craziest oversight ever. Millions of people are trying to learn or maintain their knowledge of a foreign language; grabbing foreign books, music, magazines, and TV are some of the best ways of doing so. In an ideal world, language for books and other digital media would be an option you can select from settings as it is in physical releases of movies, but right now I'm willing to double dip for the sake of learning.

For the most part, all the work is already done. The Spanish and German versions of the store came out earlier in the year. I'm not asking them to merge the stores or anything silly like that, but at least add a category for foreign books or add a setting to let users see other versions of the store. It wouldn't even be that bad if they made users jump through a couple hoops to do so. If there was a fear of breaking release dates by Country, then give the publisher the option to set a temporary region lock before it gets pushed globally. Like any other group, I'm sure foreign book publishers aren't against taking my money. I don't care if I had to keep separate currencies to use between the stores, it's certainly a better option than the current one... nothing.

What say ye, GAF? Why they gotta stop me from learning some Spanish and getting some quality reading time in?

It's regional distribution. Case in point: Canada is right next to the US, but we can't get either Google's or Amazon's music stores up here.