Same thing with college textbooks.
there was one website that was selling American textbooks from other English speaking countries to America at a fraction of what those books cost in their American editions--and the big American textbook publishers had their lawyers stop him.
I wonder how many other products this might apply to.
And irony is that people overseas can afford to work for less because their cost of living is less--and the American worker, by purchasing medicine, textbooks, and who knows what else, is subidizing the very condition that is costing America jobs.
Nice.
How many Indians could have learned programming if they had to spend $150 for every textbook.
Wasn't that the French??? We don't play with a fair playing field as long as the Socialist countries subsidize their companies.
Our education system is a product of the NEA..
The publishing industry is very weird, in no small part because it is HIGHLY regulated by the FTC. A lot of people don't know this, but many dimensions of the pricing model are fixed by the Federal government. As odd as it may sound, the FTC considers all the major publishers a de facto monopoly and regulates them as such, even though that charge is pretty ludicrous upon casual inspection. If they do not follow certain pricing guidelines, they get hit with an anti-trust suit.
The primary reason prices are so high is that the publishers are required to show pricing parity across all wholesale transactions regardless of size. What this means is that they are not allowed to price books based on amortizing the overhead of acquiring the sale, whether they are selling one book or ten thousand in the deal. The net result is that the largest book distributors in the US (e.g. Barnes & Noble, Amazon, et al) must be sold books at a base discount no better than what they give to Joe's Book Shack who orders five books a year. In essence, the entire market must be priced at the level of the most expensive transaction they do. Otherwise the Feds jump all over them.
The big distributors do get some indirect and creative comps (essentially payola) for their volume, but it isn't tied to the actual price they get invoiced for a given book. In essence, the FTC has outlawed volume discounts for books, asserting that it is an anti-competitive practice to do so. Such idiotic laws do not apply to other countries, hence why their books are cheaper and why you are not allowed to import "unregulated" books.