Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
No point of complaining about it on various international forums. That will change nothing. I would take the practical approach and buy those books from a cheaper country, so to speak, using VPN. And perhaps ask the local publisher why they charge so much for English-language ebooks (no translation involved or anything). It would be interesting what their reply would be.
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I would expect that it will come down to a combination of laws, contracts and demand. Some locations have laws and regulations that add cost and the contracts between the author and the publisher can vary quite a bit from country to country. Last how much demand is there for English language books in a country where English is not the primary language? And then there is customer and institutional inertia. They charge a price because a price point was set at some point in the past and no one ever bothered rethinking it.
Finding the price that maximizes profits (which is what the seller is trying to do) can be very inexact. Finding the price that is fair to all sides is impossible simply because people have different ideas of what's fair. Is it the price point that keeps bread on the author's table? Is it the price point that maximizes the number of books the buyer can buy? Everyone's rationalizations of the price point they favor is different, and most can come up with some sort of justification of why their preference ought to be the one used.
One interesting experiment is to take book prices in the past and using an inflation tool, project that price to present day. If you do it, you will see that books are actually cheaper now than they were some 35 years ago when I started buying books, especially when you start adjusting for the size of the book.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/