I'm surprised more people don't take Wiley (and all the other textbook publishers) to task for their price-gouging ways. Instead of going after the kid who found a good arbitrage opportunity, maybe they ought to reexamine their pricing models.
I can definitely see why Wiley is concerned. I've seen some editions for Asia or India that are cheap crap--bad enough that I'd rather buy the US edition because I like to keep my books and the foreign crap will fall apart after a couple reads. Sure, many people would buy the cheap editions and put up with the crap, but a lot of people would avoid them.
The Wiley foreign editions are not like those. When my Wiley copies of Apostol's "Calculus" volumes I and II started falling apart after 30 years of being my goto books when I needed to refresh my memory of calculus, I bought the Indian paperback editions. The pages are a little smaller than the US hardback and a little lower quality, but the binding is well done, all the material is there, and they were about $30 each (with shipping) compared to $200/each for the hardbacks.
If the Wiley Indian editions were readily available in the US, there would be almost no reason to buy the US edition, at least for textbooks like Apostol, where there are no color diagrams.
It was interesting that the total price, books + shipping, was about the same no matter where they were bought from. I could have bought from an India seller for about $5, with $25 shipping, or from US importers for about $25, with $5 shipping. I think I did find a couple Indian and Chinese sellers where I could have saved maybe $5 overall, but no way was I giving my credit card to a seller on the other side of the world that I could find no reviews of anywhere online.
BTW, those hardbacks in 1977 cost about the same as the paperbacks 30 years later. In hindsight, it would have been a good investment in 1977 to buy a bunch of copies, and resell them 30 years later. (And yes, there would be a market for them 30 years later. These books, in the same edition I bought in 1977, are still used at Caltech, MIT, and in the "honors" calculus classes at a few other top schools).
