🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8709151410.AA24491@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes:
>Not to forget retaliation on trade issues by putting a tariff on books.

	The tariff has been repealed, has it not?

>But seriously, the Bookroom (what a name) is a bit on the expensive side,
>especially for special orders. The record may be a book that sells for 38.00
>US when ordered direct from the publisher (Ablex).  The price here, and that
>was more than a year ago: 86.00$.

	(1)  The Bookroom has been known to make "mistakes" here.  I ordered
	a book recently that was us$45.  They translated that to cdn$96.
	When I pointed out that that couldn't possibly be right, it became
	$64, which was a little cheaper than I had expected.  (The
	usual rule is to add 50% to convert us dollars to cdn, taking in
	both currency conversion and, cross-border shipment and customs
	clearance costs, and the local distributor's cut.)

	(2)  Often, the problem is with the local distributor.	John
	Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd are particularly bad in the size of the cut
	they take, e.g. us$50 -> cdn $112.  Of course, they are dealing
	with low volumes of highly specialized books, whose market may in
	Canada is maybe ten to fifty units (and just hundreds world-wide).
	(The Ablex distributor is Fitzhenry and Whiteside; I have no direct
	experience with them.)

	(3)  J-F is correct, however, that one can often save money by
	ordering directly from a U.S. publisher, even after paying postage
	and handling and the costs of a bank draft.  However, some U.S.
	publishers won't accept Canadian orders; they just bounce them back
	to the Canadian distributor!  (John Wiley is an example of this.)
-- 
\\\\   Graeme Hirst    University of Toronto	Computer Science Department
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