It’s the holiday season, that magical time of year when Canadians come together to ask: Why are we still paying more for everything than Americans?Amazon launched its Canadian Kindle store a few weeks ago, and it took little time before consumers began to notice, much to their chagrin, that e-book prices in the Canadian store were consistently higher than they were in the U.S. online store.
We did our own comparison shopping on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, and consistently found e-book price differences of at least 10 per cent on most items we looked at, with a few items carrying a markup of much more than that (and a rare few with no markup at all.)
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, for instance, is $4.99 in the U.S. store and $13.99 in Canada. Granted, it’s a different publisher in the U.S., but this is a Canadian writer we’re talking about...
It was just the latest annoying chapter in the long-running saga of Canadians paying higher prices than Americans for just about everything. It’s been five years since the loonie first came within parity range of the U.S. dollar, and we still have price gaps of up to 40 per cent on some items.
But with e-books the price differential seemed especially unjustified: There are no physical books to be shipped to small Canadian bookstores thousands of kilometres from the nearest distribution centre, no import tariffs or higher rental rates on store locations to be paid. E-books are just data, in many cases less actual bits of data than the page you’re reading right now.
Original Article
Source: huffington post
Author: Daniel Tencer
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