Re: 7 Ruby Programming ebook

Michael Schuerig wrote:
| On Thursday 22 May 2008, Avdi Grimm wrote:
|> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Camilo <camilor <at> gmail.com> wrote:
|>> Rest of the world,
|>> An O'Reilly book costing $45 in the USA costs significantly much
|>> more in Peru; instead of making a straight conversion, think on
|>> monthly minimum wages.
|> I was under the impression that publishers priced differently in
|> different markets.  Is this not the case?
|
| That may be true for academic textbooks where several publishers
| have "international" (read: non-US) editions. For technical books in
| general this doesn't appear to be true. I live in Germany and often
| find that it is cheaper to order books from amazon.com than from
| amazon.de, even taking customs duty into account.

This may be an artifact of the German Buchpreisbindung.

For our international friends:

Books are a cultural good, and thus not something you should leave to
the market forces, which also means a lower VAT of 7% instead of 19%.
Therefore, books are priced according to page count and type of binding
(hardcovers can be more expensive than softcovers, which in turn can be
more expensive than pocketbooks).

Which means that highly successful books like by Stephen King are as
expensive (or cheap) as the less successful books (like Wolfgang Holbein).

(N.B.: The German book market is thriving, and new talent, German as
well as international, gets published, too.)

However: This only counts for books produced and sold in Germany, and
that aren't damaged (this leads to funny situations, where books get
priced cheaper that only have a black marker going across the pages on
the outside, say the bottom, and which are otherwise fine). Imported
books can be priced as the retailer likes, as they aren't covered by the
Buchpreisbindung.

This makes it unattractive to go to the length of translating a
technical book (most of us developers can speak English anyhow, if only
for professional reasons) and printing a German version of it.

This also means, that the books have to be imported at a cost, and that,
in turn, increases the price for the end-consumer.

And yes, especially with the US Dollar being as weak as it is, importing
a book from the US is cheaper (especially if you manage to stay below
the customs duty threshold of 5 Euros: Then it is only a trip to customs
to pick up the books).

Also, Tyler Cowen touched on this subject in a recent blog post:
<http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/05/why-are-books-s.html>

--
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan
Blog: http://justarubyist.blogspot.com

Use recursive procedures for recursively-defined data structures.
~            - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plaugher)