He forgets to mention the point that there are usually "international editions" of all textbooks that are sold for half the price or even less. And they are not only sold in developing countries but in virtually every market that is not north america. Coincidentally searching for them on Amazon.com even directly via the ISBN usually leads no results. I remember reading an article where publishers used copyright law against reimporters of such editions.
In Australia textbooks typically cost $100-150 a title so I'm guessing that is on par with America. I've also been able to source these international editions at a fraction of the price by purchasing online. However, tech books from the likes of O'Reilly can easily cost 2-3 times as much here, putting them in the same league as textbooks.
I found it amusing when we had a representative from a publisher speak at the first lecture for a subject. He had a slide saying "buy locally" and was encouraging students to buy his ebook which was twice the price of the international edition I had already purchased but marginally cheaper than his print edition.
The end result is that students are not buying textbooks anymore and those that do are importing them from overseas. The independent co-operative bookshop at my university went out of business last year as a result. The university opened their own bookshop with ridiculously high prices as well, but minimal staffing from what I could tell. I don't think they can sustain the high prices in the long term without the whole thing falling in a heap.
This was exactly what I used to do. The "international edition" is exactly the same book--1:1 content inside, maybe not printed on glossy pages with color, and a different cover + ISBN. A lot of these books are available at sites like abebooks.com, if you just search by the original ISBN. I was able to find current edition books that would sell new for $120 on Amazon, for $30 new on abebooks.
The one (small) downside for me was the resell process, or even resell possibility. You can't sell them on Amazon. Most of the time I just kept the good books for myself, to maybe use in the future. At the end, a lot of the times it cost me less to go with the international edition and keep it, than buy the original edition and resell it.
