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While I will not necessarily defend Australian publishers pushing extremely high prices, regional publishing actually does make sense in a lot of cases.
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What you say may apply for physical goods but I can't see how it is justified in the case of digital media such as ebooks and music. Where are the extra costs, especially as most the infrastructure costs (web servers etc) are likely all in India or China anyway.
What the WWW has done is expose the true extent of geographic pricing and restrictions to a lot more people than when publishers controlled all media. The result is that people might put off buying an item until the local price comes down to meet the US one or order direct from US if they can. Attempts to block direct ordering may cause the customer to not buy from that provider at all.
If it is very obvious that the supplier is screwing me on price I will stop being a customer for that product, or any products from that supplier. I will not buy from a number of providers for exactly that reason, including Apple and Adobe, I don't care how "magical" the thing.
So my suggestion is to fire the idiot marketeer or whoever suggests/insists on differential pricing where there is no reasonable reason, adopt a global price and promote the fact. The Supplier gets to save a couple of salaries and will likely sell far more than when the pricing was more creative.