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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Well, great. A 1300-page book available for under $15 plus international shipping... or as an audiobook, 66 hours long ( but free shipping!) for... $70?

Something has gone deeply wrong in the market here. If only there were some way to convey three and a half pounds of information across the ocean in less than a month and for a reasonable price. :(

Ironically, it seems to be easy to buy an ebook of cliffs notes to this one.

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If you're going to sully the Caro read with Cliff's Notes, you may as well just read the Wikipedia page.

Obviously I'm not going to. I'm complaining that while the book itself is ludicrously difficult to buy, getting the cliffs notes is easy.

Where are you trying to get it shipped to? I see paperbacks of the Caro book with free delivery on Amazon US, DE, UK and JP.

Ludicrously difficult? I just ordered it for AUD$32.19 delivered, to Australia, in two or three clicks.

It's a book from 1975, so there's no digital version, and it's probably not worth the time to make an ebook for the sales it gets.

I actually emailed the publisher about this, as the power broker is one of my favorite books (but totally impractical to carry around).

I got a response saying that they would love to do an ebook version of TPB, but Robert Caro won't allow them to do that - he even refuses to submit his writing digitally, instead writing everything by hand, then typing it up with a typewriter, which is then retyped by a typist at the publisher into Word.

I've read plenty of older books in ebook form; they're riddled with obvious OCR errors but perfectly intelligible. Making an ebook from a paper book, as far as I know, involves no more than putting it into a special-purpose shredder that separates and scans the pages, and since those already exist, the cost of doing so is extremely low.

IP issues are something else again.

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