> I found the infallible logic of ConkCurrency irresistibly hilarious (not a good thing).

Neither is an Ad-hominem attack a good thing.

> Why wouldn't you be able to purchase an ebook in India from the site in US? You can most certainly get a PDF.

You missed the whole point - fair price as an instrument against copyright infringement, so to speak.

The fact that there are EEE's shows that publishers hold the concept of variable pricing valid. It's older than at least two decades.

> You can also find the same material online: regular expressions in all shapes and sizes.

As if this post is only about regular expressions. It appears to be more about the book. You seem to have realised that - talking of clicks and whatever else - but not put 2 and 2 together - to realise the comment was about fair price based on lifestyle.

If your Feds screw up any further, it wont sound so hilarious. Trust me, it won't. Check out what happened to Brazil and Japan in the late 90s.

There are countless places to learn regex for free on today's web. Does Jeff not know that? Sure he does. I know that too. But this is a good time to get good people - authors of a book on a strictly hacker realm - to read about and take note of this bigger problem which they may not have given a priority to. And in general to increase awareness of this issue. India is one country.

The dollar is expensive in many more countries - many that do _not_ take outsourced jobs from you, so you have no reason to perceive a threat from them.

Do you realise that if everyone outside US/UK buys these books at small prices, authors still stand to gain more money?

This is also a nice way to reciprocate the freebies they give us - in clear words, suggesting a way from which they could get that much more income and thus more encouragement to produce better works.

All this thought goes behind writing a simple suggestion. If you do not give a new idea any thought, how are you going to invent anything?

Apologies for the personal response.

Can Indians purchase e-books (and print them out) if they are purchased online? The Kindle has not arrived in India, AFAIK. While some books that the publishers think have demand make it to the market in Eastern Economy Editions which are sanely priced, many good books do not. If it costs $5 for a Starbucks coffee (maybe in a nice ambience) in the US, it costs INR 50 out here.
So if a book costs $25, it should roughly cost abt 250 here.
Some calculation of that sort - if you buy 1000 Regex books, it costs you an average monthly ordinary developer salary. Here the ordinary developer salary is INR 30,000. So I should be able to buy the Regex books at INR 30 apiece.
This is not accurate or correct. But let us say INR 150 per copy. Comes to $3. This is the disparity. Hence if the book has no EAstern Economy Edition, we have to buy it at $20 or whatever, online.
Tough on us to go straight way. Most people end up using torrents.
I suspect the rest of the world has similar reasons to make copies for cheap. This is not a programming problem, but it can have a solution which might come from programmers. Like we make a constantly updating, open-currency index based on livelihood expenses - bread, grains, water, power, etc, etc.

Alternatively, give me the book on bittorrent :-P