Antifragile question

I found a reference to this in Google Books in a book on publishing law titled, appropriately enough, "Publishing Law." The issue is that books are published in exclusive territories within jurisdictions. So a book published by one publisher in the US cannot also be published by another in the same format in the US. But over here all our states are consolidated into one territory. In Europe, all the countries are within a consolidated market called the EU so now there must be a distinction made between an edition published within an exclusive territory that is a country (i.e. "Germany") versus one published without exclusivity by country in the EU or even globally. The article mentions that digital goods are often subject to non-exclusive markets because of the nature of how they are sold on the Internet.

I'm not a publishing lawyer and I'm sure I've gotten parts of this wrong, but you get the general idea and can follow this link to read the source material I found: http://bit.ly/ZD9Wwc

Rob, your explanation is great and it has its drawbacks. For instance, most of these publishers hardly cover the African marlet making access to them extremely difficult.