Four Books

[Alexander Jacoby]

Sorry - you're quite right - it is available - but I'm still surprised that the copies available on American Amazon at under $40 are all from other sellers - ie, it seems you can't yet buy the paperback directly through Amazon. This is perplexing.
   
  In response to your comment about the way that the prices of academic books have been driven up, I suppose it's because sellers now have a better awareness of what is rare and hence in demand. In the past, bookshops just had to stick Bordwell's Ozu in the window or on the shelf in the hope that a passing Japanese movie buff would happen along, and demand for that particular copy in that particular place was inherently limited. But now every Ozu fan in the world can be competing online for the few available second-hand copies, the laws of supply and demand are causing the effects we see.
   
  ALEX
  
   
  

"Mark D. Roberts" <mroberts37 at mail-central.com> wrote:
  
    On Jan 21, 2008, at 11:03 AM, noble 1362 wrote:

  Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer's Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts sounds great but at $125 much too rich for me!


  Paperback copies are available from Amazon.com for under US$40.
  

  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?
  

  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.
  

  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.
  

  Is anybody on this list actually going to pay US$150 for a used paperback academic study, even the "definitive" one?
  

  



       
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