I am non-American, too. Apple will let me buy English books as long as I have a valid US Apple ID. Go to Ebay, buy a US iTunes gift card, and you have one. Amazon will let me buy English books as long as I have a US credit card. That one is harder to get a hold of. You need friends. Google now needs a credit card and an IP address. The latter can be done easily and legally through services like socksify.com or even tor.

You can get technical literature from PragProg or OReilly from anywhere. There are plenty of good small ebook publishers out there.

It should come as no surprise that Google searches for ebooks rate piracy-related sites higher than ebook shops. It is currently way harder to buy an ebook than to pirate it.

But book publishers suck in the same way record companies suck. And they will go the same way record companies went.