[rooneel]

>I paid £5 including delivery.

While I agree IEEE is evil, the practice is standard among publishers, or any economic entity. It's called price discrimination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination). The seller usually makes the difference the amount that price arbitrage is unprofitable. The producer (IEEE in this case) often does this to create presence in markets where it would otherwise be uncompetitive: the pricing reflects the cost only of printing and getting the book to the customer. Do we all want to buy books at South Asian prices? YES! Can we: No! That would drive the producers dead right away.

[rahimnathwani]

For those who didn't click the link, the classic example of price discrimination is movie tickets. There is one price for adults, and another for children, even though the costs to the cinema are the same either way.

Yes, the ability to separate markets and thereby price discriminate will increase producer profits. Yes, this will sometimes make otherwise unviable products viable. However, this is not always the case. In the case of textbooks, I would suspect that, if producers could not discriminate, they would price at roughly the 'Western' price, and people in low income countries would be unable to afford a licensed copy of these books. Perhaps we would save a small percentage, but not much.