Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Each book is unique, but this is really meaningless. This is not a case of setting a unique price for a unique product. Publishers generally set prices for categories of books. For instance, looking at my original post, it seems new releases in Australia have a minimum price of $14.99. This can be contrasted with Amazon's $9.99 US before agency pricing.
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You can't compare prices between 2 very different countries without considering cost-of-living, wages, taxes, currency fluctuations and business expenses. For example, you don't include US sales tax or exchange rates in your price comparisons. That $9.99 book would cost me $10.69 or AU$11.38 today but AU$12.08 a few months ago. Of course, your prices include VAT.
Also, minimum wage is considerably higher in Australia. Currently $16.87 (with full health ins) or US$15.85/hour. In the US it is $7.25 or AU$7.72. So a US worker earning minimum wage would have to work 1.5 hours to buy that $9.99 book but an Australian worker only 0.9 hours for a $14.99 title. So from a value proposition the Australian shopper may feel its worth the $14.99 more so than the American one. In a sense, books are actually less expensive in Australia looking at this one metric.
Everyone wants to save money and the internet makes it easy to compare prices. And during 2012/2013 when the Australian dollar exceeded parity with the US, products appeared very cheap I'm sure.
While you may want retailers to reduce prices, I'm positive you don't want your wages reduced to match.
And India's minimum wage is 28 cents.