All of those paperbacks were purchased from the US publishers before the US/CDN dollar parity and are currently sitting in huge warehouses or on store shelves collecting dust. I can certainly understand why book sellers are still charging the book price since their inventory lost around 30% of its market value in the last year. 30% of the billions of dollars worth of unsold books is an insane amount of money! A lot of smaller book stores would go out of business if they had to sell their books at the US listed price.

Most likely you recently bought Book 7 in the the Harry Potter series. I paid around $22 at Walmart where the actual price on the book jacket is $45. Wow, what a savings! How can they afford to give me 50% off? Oh wait. Between volume discount and the higher CDN dollar it makes perfect sense.

I really feel for the book selling industry but I am boycotting physical books until price comes back to reality. The book sellers are just going to have to take the hit. They should lower the price to sell off current inventory to provide capital to buy new books at the parity price. Of course that is assuming that the population of Canada has slowed their book buying and that US publishers have lowered their price to Canadian book sellers.

Bring on the e-books! Cory Doctorow offers all of his books as free e-book downloads.

My next step was the hit the previous post link to see what sort of a writer this guy was. The previous post was about fences and again was quite humorous although filled with Americana (which makes sense as he is an American). His argument was why not fence in Iraq to keep the terrorists in and included the quotes “How do I invest in fences?” and “Can’t we just put a fence around Iraq and hope they turn into Australians over time?” which I actually laughed out loud at. Going back further required wading through a few more posts about voting and being sick but I then came upon the post Blame Room Service which totally sold me on reading the rest of his blog in the coming months. He gives an anecdotal account of an experience he had with a belligerent author who was humiliated at work by her co-workers using cut and paste and an old Dilbert comic. She had the lack of brains to assume it was Scott’s fault and went so far as to call and attack him about it over copyright issues (of which there are none in the first place). I highly recommend you stop what your doing and read that post because it is hilarious and gives me leave to call him a pompous jerk.

For now I am adding the Dilbert Blog to my RSS.