The authors of a forthcoming Economics Letters article (pdf) gathered data from Amazon’s American, British, and Canadian web sites to demonstrate international price discrimination. According to the authors, Americans pay significantly more for textbooks on average. They offer a number of demand-side hypotheses but do not test them.
I’ve found a number of cases where American customers can save money by purchasing their textbooks from amazon.co.uk and paying for international shipping (£6.98) rather than using amazon.com. Check it out:
| Title | Authors | .com | .co.uk | $ diff | % diff | |
| Mathematics for Economists | Simon & Blume | 126.74 | 84.69 | 42.05 | 33 | |
| Advanced Macroeconomics | Romer | 56.25 | 83.56 | -27.31 | -49 | |
| Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data |
Wooldridge | 80 | 89.98 | -9.98 | -12 | |
| Economics for Business | Sloman | 95 | 73.39 | 21.61 | 23 | |
| Mathematics for Economics and Business | Jacques | 115 | 75.84 | 39.16 | 34 | |
| Options, Futures and Other Derivatives | Hull | 158.99 | 88.45 | 70.54 | 44 | |
| Statistics for Business and Economics | Newbold et al. | 153.33 | 91.84 | 61.49 | 40 | |
| Introductory Econometrics for Finance | Brooks | 35.5 | 61.17 | -25.67 | -72 | |
| Statistics for Economics, Accounting and Business Studies |
Barrow | 100 | 75.84 | 24.16 | 24 | |
| Microeconomics: Principles and Analysis | Cowell | 78.35 | 79.32 | -0.97 | -1 | |
Prices reported in USD with an exchange rate of 1.88 USD per GBP.
Trade Diversion 
Amazon.co.uk
VS
I was reading Trade Diversion and found this information. Beware, you may find out that everything you know about buying cheap stuff in the Internet may be wrong.
I use to buy at least once or twice a month on http://www.amazon...
Watch out for the duty. I had to pay more duty on a book I had sent from Amazon.co.uk to Canada than the original price of the volume. (It was not yet released in North America)
Amazon’s US textbook ripoff?
Are US students being ripped off by Amazon.com? Jonathan Dingel at Trade Diversion blog points to a forthcoming paper by Yale’s Christos Cabolis and colleagues, A Textbook Example of International Price Discrimination (PDF). The paper finds that althou…
This is also the case with research more generally. I have found that a lot of academic papers are free for people outside the OECD (or something) but people from more developed countries face a charge. I guess this is price discrimination and helps to allow the dissemination of research.