[riverrunner]

Yes the power of the web . The book sellers could once hide behind distance now they no longer can. As with many things the web as opened up many new ways.

[blam]

Sounds like the American consumer is off-setting the cost of education in foreign countries just like we do on drugs.

[Fresh Wind]

Not only do they overcharge for the books, but they change the book selection frequently to prevent students from selling the books to each other. So, in most cases, you are stuck with an overpriced tome that you will never, ever open again in your life.

[Lazamataz]

Heads up!

[TankerKC]

"We couldn't understand why what costs $120 here should cost $50-something there..."

Then they should take an economics course.

[Lizavetta]

In Britain, though, the cost of tuition is largely borne by the government

No, it is borne by the gouged British taxpayer.

... and students pay much less.

..until they graduate and become gouged British taxpayers, so they wind up paying for that low-tuition education for the rest of their stinkin' lives.

Yet another article that capitalizes on the fact that most people don't know the TANSTAAFL truism.....there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

[HiTech RedNeck]

My guess is that textbook publishers will seek to thwart this by presenting the same information in "rearranged" ways in different countries' English language editions, making the overseas books more difficult to synchronize to American instruction. E.g. rearrange chapters where the information is relatively independent from chapter to chapter, and regroup chapters in different clumps where it is important that the knowledge set progress as the book progresses. Modern XML formats would make this almost trivial.

[Poohbah]

Gosh, when foreign nations do this with steel or minivans or what-have-you, it's called "dumping" and the usual suspects hyperventilate over it.

[Allan]

Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50

What's with this $50?
Many standard textbooks and computer manuals
sell for $10 or less in India.

[Lil'freeper]

"This is a season when textbook publishers get kicked around a lot, and they're feeling vulnerable,"

Waaaaah.

[cookcounty]

Textbook publishing is one of the most scam-ridden industries in America. They publish ever-bigger, heavier books while imparting less and less knowledge.

[stainlessbanner]

[cookcounty]

""I buy from Amazon.co.uk and from sources in the Far East, and I knew more and more students were doing the same thing, individually," said Tom Frey, owner of the University Bookstore at Purdue University, who sells the new books from overseas at the same price as a used American book. "Then this fall, for the first time, the Fed Ex man told me that the students at the Indian Association here at Purdue had just gotten a delivery of 14 skids of books, about 50 books each, from India. I think I'm losing about 10 percent of my sales to overseas books."

As a FedEx man myself, this is a wonderful heart-warming story to start my day with.

[richtig_faust]

OH it gets better. When I was in grad school all the orientals had "knock off" text books. for instance, J.D. Jackson's "Classical Electromagnetics" cost me $105 - they paid $5, and they had all the solutions manuals also.

[Final Authority]

I'll tell you a story about the reason the costs of textbooks are so high. In our system the administration decided to convert the math curriculum to Math-Land. The coordinators and select teachers got to go to a seminar in Maui HI for their trouble, spouses too. Guess who paid for this? If you think it was the publisher think again, it was the taxpayer in the cost of higher prices. In education stuff like this happens all the time, it is just a different form of corruption.