That level of foreign books sales on his carp imagined memoirs is hard to believe.
These sales numbers do not surprise me with a book of this kind (by an American president). Sometimes the foreign rights make it possible for the publisher to actually make a good profit on the book. (Obama’s books would have been profitable anyway, of course.) The foreign rights are sold to many different countries and the book is printed in many languages.
As for printing the books here, that kind of shipping of vast quantities of books hasn’t been done since the 19th century. Harper Brothers, founded in 1817, used to ship all its books in from England. Then the lightbulb went off and they realized they could save tons of money by printing them here—the beginning of American book publishing.