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The book industry did this too, years ago. They would sell normal books in the West but cheaper versions, with lighter weight paper etc, in Eastern countries. T
by imglorp 5y ago
The book industry did this too, years ago. They would sell normal books in the West but cheaper versions, with lighter weight paper etc, in Eastern countries. There's no lock of course, but before the internet it was harder to buy a cheap copy of Knuth from India if you lived in US.
The point is, ink extortion seems to thrive on pricing tiers for different markets, just like content extortion does.
- sofixa 5y agoIn France many books come in a default format which is a massive waste of space - big size, the paper is very thick, the font is pretty big, and there's a lot of whitespace on each page. And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. If it were just the font it could be explained by targeting/adapting to people with poor vision, but the rest makes no sense besides to waste paper.
- dtgriscom 5y agoWasting paper doesn't seem like a likely goal for a business. Could this format be designed to satisfy some local expectations as to the look and feel of a "quality" book?
- dpark 5y agoNo, no. It must be the intentional paper wasting because corporations are intrinsically evil, and so will choose evil solutions even if they are not profitable.
- beaconstudios 5y agoI mean, corporations are intrinsically evil because they will choose evil solutions if they're also profitable.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y agoAs someone who vision is not getting better, the bigger font with more whitespace sound good to me! I prefer paper books over e-readers, but many print book have fonts that too small whereas e-readers are adjustable.
- jlengrand 5y agothat, and the fact that the default versions look much better on a shelf and at home than the pocket editions :).
- tcbawo 5y agoThey like to justify a $10 difference in price with $1 more worth of raw materials. It's like when you go to an Italian restaurant and order a plate of pasta for $17, but are happy with the value because you get so much.
- hk__2 5y ago> And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. It’s not "some" books get one and others get the other. All books get out in a first format decided by the publisher. There’s no "default" format; it can be big or small depending on the author/publisher’s choice. Then, later, you have reprints, which are often (but not always) in a cheaper format, the one we call "livre de poche" and which sells for less money. But this reduced price has little to do with the format; paper doesn’t account much in what you pay for a book. When you do reprints you have reduced costs everywhere because the text is already there: no need for a translator, reviewers, etc; also, there’s no marketing and the author’s fees are usually lower. In fact, in Italy, reprints are cheaper even if they are usually printed in the same format as the first edition.
- dogma1138 5y agoVideo games are the same there are regions with far lower prices for new titles like Latin America, Russia and some parts of Asia. A lot of the keys sold on various sites come from those regions, some companies iirc Ubisoft started implementing region locks. Region locks on DVDs other than due to issues of distribution rights especially for dubbing and subtitles followed the same logic especially in Russia where region locked DVDs were released much earlier and for much cheaper as piracy was far more common there than in the west.
- luma 5y agoWiley also attempted to make importing those foreign versions illegal, because of course they did. It eventually took the US Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of common sense.
- scapp 5y agoIn case anyone's curious, the SCOTUS case was Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john-wiley-sons-inc/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john...
- xeromal 5y agoIn college, the international book was always disallowed and most of the time, the chapters and pages were just jumbled up. Nothing more.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoThe professor might benefit financially from the sale of the book, e.g. if they're the author. It's quite common, really.
- xeromal 5y agoYeah, I had to buy one or two really shitty homemade-looking books the prof wrote. On the other side, I had professors that wrote their own curriculum and did their best to enjoy we didn't waste money on unnecessary books.
- tdeck 5y agoMy experience was different. I bought them in college whenever possible and none of the professors cared. Often they were exactly the same content, although sometimes the questions differed. Probably varies by institution.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoI have the Indian edition of Sedra and Smith, the difference being greyscale rather than black/white/blue images and rather worse paper. And a dire warning about where the book may be sold.