literary arbitrage
The two books I just bought on Amazon.com cost me $37.74, plus shipping to Spain of $13.47, for a total of $51.21.
The same books are available on Amazon.co.uk for a total of £28.35, plus shipping to Spain of £5.97 and VAT of £1.37 for a grand total of £35.69 or USD $71.15.
So you can pay $51 to have the books shipped (in theory) from the US, or pay roughly 40% more and have them shipped (in theory) from the UK. The difference in shipping time isn’t much either, in practice. Even if the price of mailing in the UK were free and there were no VAT, it would still be cheaper to have books sent from the US.
The dollar hit a 26-year low against the pound in April of this year (2007). If it keeps falling and Amazon don’t adjust their pricing, I might start a side business in literary arbitrage.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.