I have been buying books from Amazon for about a decade. Since I moved to Motovun, there has been no other way to get books worth reading, either. Until recently, everything has worked perfectly smoothly, and I have often wondered at the speed with which I can get any book that tickles my fancy. I was thus stunned a few days ago when it turned out that I happened to be living in a wrong country. A banned country, to be a bit more precise. My order could not be completed because Croatia was not on the list of countries to which my book of choice could be delivered by post. My recent troubles with my Lloyds Bank debit card immediately crossed my mind (“An Unreliable Country,” September 10, 2007). To better understand what was the problem with Amazon, I sent an electronic-mail message to their customer service. A short while later I got their reply, but it was far from what I had hoped for. I wanted to know why Croatia was banned, but I was even more interested in all the other blacklisted countries. I wanted their succulent names. As I learned, they do not have such a list, but some of their suppliers apparently do. Unfortunately, they could not tell me more about their suppliers’ shipping policies. And that was that. To tell the truth, all I was looking for was a list of exotic countries such as Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Right next to Croatia, too.