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<br><div><div>On Jan 21, 2008, at 11:03 AM, noble 1362 wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts sounds great but at $125 much too rich for me!</i><br></span></blockquote></div><br><div>Paperback copies are available from Amazon.com for under US$40.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>List price is US$35.95, though some shops are charging up to US$87 for "new" copies that "may have a small remainder mark". What's up with that?</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Parenthetically, has anybody else noticed that the advent of online book selling has driven costs of these academic books *up* rather than down? I.e., Bordwell's book on Ozu is at least $150 for a used copy today, and there is a shop in Florida asking US$378 for it (I know there's an online PDF version of this book, but that is a recent development). The same pattern seems to apply in the case of other books.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Not that I believe in all the toss about the free market making commodities more affordable, etc., but I'm baffled by these exorbitant prices.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Is anybody on this list actually going to pay US$150 for a used paperback academic study, even the "definitive" one?</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></body></html>