Sometimes being caught between countries sucks. I want to buy software item “A” in English. You can buy it in America just fine. In Japan? Not available–just in Japanese, sorry. And retailers in the U.S. won’t ship it to you, as it violates the license for the Japanese seller, even though the language makes it a different product. And the Japanese seller can’t be bothered to sell an English version, even if it’s a download which would be dead simple to sell. Seriously, they’d just have to spend five minutes altering their web site, and they’d have more sales. But nope, can’t be bothered.

It is especially frustrating for my college, an American college in Japan. We are essentially a bubble of English language, a small bit of American soil in the heart of Tokyo. Our model is to replicate the experience at home campus. Except, of course, that those who sell software and media usually don’t recognize this. Can’t have the U.S. version, Japanese version doesn’t fit, you’re outta luck too bad.

I fear this will be the case with ebook purchases, in that we have lots of students here who would love to use ebook readers for textbooks, but international licensing agreements will probably frustrate us. Because of our location, we won’t have access to the textbooks we need–America won’t sell and Japan won’t offer.

Essentially, being a stranger in a strange land is a niche that businesses haven’t paid enough attention to, something which makes zero sense in a digital world. There are some businesses which address us, but they usually see us as prey more than customers, people who are left out and so will pay a premium to get what everybody else takes for granted.

Apple is one of the few businesses which has done a fair job of addressing this. When Apple makes software, they allow for a variety of languages to be used. Their OS software, whether for computers, the iPhone, or iPad, comes with at least a dozen base languages built-in. Apple’s software architecture allows for “localization,” or various languages to be built into every software package. Switch your OS to a new language, and all apps with that language in their localization files will automatically run in that language. Which means that if I buy Apple software in Japan, it simply runs in English for me, because my OS is set to that language.

You see this in a few other places–for example, the “Ultimate Matrix” Blu-ray set is sold in English, but put it in a Japanese player and it switches languages. Unfortunately, such setups are rare. Windows, for example, refuses to do this, and even many Mac software makers stodgily refuse to localize, instead issuing different packages for each language.