College textbooks published in the United States but exported to booksellers overseas are in many cases cheaper for students to “reimport” than it is for them to buy from domestic booksellers. With textbook prices skyrocketing, college bookstores in North Carolina and nationwide are discussing ways to exploit those cheaper overseas prices.
While the issue has been a popular topic for the past few years with the National Association of College Stores, which also has been discussing it with the Association of American Publishers, it broke nationwide after The New York Times published articles and op-eds on the subject in late October 2003.
The crux of the matter is, as Times writer Tamar Lewin wrote Oct. 21, that the “very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price — or less — in England.” Two recent changes have occurred that are making reimportation easier, Lewin said. The Internet makes it easy to see foreign book prices, and in 1998 the Supreme Court ruled “that federal copyright law does not protect American manufacturers from having the products they arranged to sell overseas at a discount shipped back for sale in the United States.”
Textbook publishers say that the differences between American and foreign markets dictate the price difference. Economic theory suggests that price discrimination can succeed when firms can avoid resentment over the different prices or prevent lower-price purchasers from arbitrage, i.e., reselling to the higher-price buyers for a profit while still undercutting the prices they had been paying.
Publishers can no longer avoid American resentment now that the Internet can quickly show them the vastly different foreign prices, and Lewin’s article provided examples of students engaging in textbook arbitrage. Under this new environment for textbook sales, it is likely the price differential between foreign and U.S. prices for the same textbooks will fall.
In late fall 2003, articles in some student newspapers in University of North Carolina schools — in UNC-Wilmington’s The Seahawk, UNC-Greensboro’s The Carolinian, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s The Daily Tar Heel — discussed the money-saving potential of ordering books overseas.
Not only are students going to foreign distributors (whether just to save themselves money or to make money through textbook arbitrage). As Lewin wrote, “Many college bookstores [are now] arranging their own overseas purchases.”
They include UNC-CH’s Student Stores. An article in the DTH of Nov. 6 said, “Student Stores officials are looking into the possibility of purchasing textbooks from overseas.”
Jon Sanders is assistant editor of Carolina Journal.