Copyright Supreme Court Case

[Dylan]

[John Galt]

could have tariffs on it, i suppose, but i dont know how much those are. i cant imagine large, if any, tariffs on textbooks (average tariffs are 1.3% and i suspect most of those are actually in agriculture)

[eric]

[Sazari]

Price discrimination actually helps bring down the cost in the states. Publishers can then maintain profit margins while reducing costs here because they have a revenue stream in another country. If they didn't price discriminate then they would out price themselves in the foreign markets and not make any more money. If they drop their prices here they lose a huge amount of profit. Actually the textbook industry's profit margins are somewhere around 25%, which is well within the norm for such retail goods.

On thing often not mentioned is that foreign textbooks are usually stripped down. Paperback covers, printed in black and white, no supplementary material. I always bought my econ books from India and the quality (but not content) is dramatically different.

[John Galt]

omg black and white

i cant remember the last time i read book in black and white

[Dylan]

[The Dude]

this will be an interesting case I will be following. Has the potential to be a wide-reaching decision is they rule against the guy.

[PoS]

Its a publisher conspiracy because they regularly collude on price depending on which country youre at. Its been a racket that has been going on for decades. I remember when I was in college I wouldnt even buy the damned textbooks, since each professor was required to have at least two copies in the library I would just rent the books from there and photocopy any relevant pages as needed.

[eric]