Cheaper E-Book Readers ?

[mrdini]

Originally Posted by nairbv

@natch: I was referring to the fact that the iliad and the hanlin cost $100 more if purchased within China. I don't know much about the iliad but wrt the hanlin, it's *made* in China, and regardless of if I'm buying from inside or outside of China, I'd be ordering directly from the tianjin based company which would be shipping it to me. When I tell them I'm located *in* China the price goes up a hundred bucks, and they can't give me any kind of explination besides that it's their "product policy." I can understand an "early adoption premium," I know these things are expensive, but the deal with the hanlin just seems like an idiot tax.

I was browsing a chinese forum via Google Translate, & came across something that might explain the reason for the price differential.

This is GUESSWORK - I'm not too confident in the machine translation, but in China, when you buy a Hanlin eBook reader, you get access to several free books via their internal network. (I think around 10,000?)

Now - the catch is that they're not really free You're paying for them in the increased price of the eBook reader

Since western customers can't get access to these ebooks - well....

[rogerk]

Got my Sony reader to Australia over Xmas. Sure they will be expensive for the first year. But just to own such a new device is cool.

[mogui]

As it has been explained to me, many products made in China are more expensive inside China because of the Value Added Taxes. A good example was my HP laptop that I bought in Canada. When I priced the same model in China, it was more expensive.

I prefer to do my tech shopping in the west.

Speaking of shopping in China, my ISP gave me a surprise. We use WiFi here and have three PCs online at any time. The ISP blocked our access because they detected we were using more than one PC on the line. They also said we couldn't use a router. They run a script that checks packets to see if more than one IP address is on the connection. They also detect routers, presumably by checking the Time To Live in the packet. So we had to change our account to permit two machines. Now we run with fixed IP addresses, two of them, and have to be careful not to have certain computers on when others are being used. I wanted to set up one PC as a router and somehow fiddle with the TTL so we could have as many PCs running at the same time as we wished. But I got distracted by going to Thailand.