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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

There's a potential of grey market imports. If a publisher has a lower quality, but much cheaper, product for one market, and a higher quality more expensive product for the US market, buyers should have the choice, but should also know what they're buying.

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Publishers use ISBN #s to differentiate the quality and content of their books today. Unless the publishers are trying to deceive consumers by using the same ISBN # for significantly different quality copies of a book then I don't see how this is a new risk to consumers.

Adding to this, if a seller on Amazon sends you a different ISBN than the one you ordered, you can return it, because that's not what you ordered.

Those cheaper copies for non-US markets are what's typically called (at least in the textbook world) as "international" editions. They're not allowed to be sold on Amazon, as per Amazon's policies. It's a shame too, because textbooks are usually so very expensive.

And as noted elsewhere, they have different ISBNs than the US editions, so if a seller send and int'l edition when you ordered a US edition, they did not send the book you ordered and the ISBN discrepancy proves that, so you should return it and complain to Amazon.

Why? Unless the cheaper product is of an inferior quality than the more expensive product, then it is capitalism trying to route around an artificial cost.

I would not be happy if a publisher would make such things. I mean there's mostly a hardcover and a paperback version, yes. but if they actually make books in lower qualities for others markets, that would be hilarious. why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products? isn't this some sort of discrimination?

> why should somebody from a poorer market only have access to bad quality products

It would be even worse if customers in the poorer market only had access to products they can't afford. The important thing IMHO is that the lower quality version also has a lower price, and that, in case of re-import, there's a way for customers to know.

In a country like India, we had eastern economy and similarly other subsidized editions. If a book costs 100 USD, it is beyond range of most students, as this crosses their monthly budget.

So, while arbitrary these barriers have the place till we have movement of people.

Price discrimination, yeah. You make cheap versions of a product for people who are very price sensitive- that is, people without much money. You still make a profit, they get a version of the product they can afford.

I did this with math textbooks in college. You can buy "gray market" books, which are versions made for foreign markets but bought by resellers and reimported to the US. They're the same exact book, but printed without color, on cheap paper in a cheap binding. This was perfect for me, since they were also much cheaper than the US edition.

If anything, the discrimination was going the other way. The only way to get a cheap copy of the book was to buy it off the gray market- the punisher wouldn't sell the cheap editions inside the US.

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