Not that it matters in the legal case, but I'd be interested to know if the publishers in question are manufacturing the books that are sold in America in America. And I seriously doubt that the answer is yes, because large scale printing has been broadly outsourced to great advantage for a long time now. Lots of American printed material is made in Asia.
So...if that's the case, this Cornell student can have his relatives buy books at retail in Asia, ship them, I assume, a few at a time, to him in the US, turn around and sell them to American students at enough of a discount to make them very attractive and still make enough of a margin to earn 1/2 million doing it on his own?
Good for him.
The American publishers who are manufacturing the books in Asia, shipping them over here by the pallet load, and then marking up cost + shipping so much that they can't compete with this kid's little cottage industry? Can you say "price gouging?"
Yeah, I know, retail markup and all that. I still hope they lose this one. It's getting harder and harder for the middle class to send their kids to college. Below that level? Smart kids don't have much of a chance. And we cannot remain competitive as a nation by educating only the elite. Yeah. I hope they lose, and a whole underground industry grows and forces the textbook publishers to be more competitive.
Tim