Actually almost all the Indian editions of the book are much more cheaper than its US based price in Dollars. And when you look at the paper quality, it feels like the price is justified.

Also not to look over the fact that both are published by PearsonEd. The US version by Addison-Wesley and the Indian version by Dorling-Kindersley. Both are PearsonEd subsidiaries.

Indeed. My current copy of CLRS3 is a like-new Eastern Economy Edition paperback. I paid $20 or $30 for it off Amazon versus $92 list price or $55 on Amazon for the hardcover, and I considered that to be a good deal.

Yes. CLRS I had ordered almost the same time as TAOCP and although I was skeptical at the beginning, I was surprised that it was a good edition.

The biggest problem is though, once we've bought the Indian edition, we wont buy the original edition(obviously). This makes it difficult for us to gauge how much off the edition we own is from the original one.

I used the Eastern Economy Edition version of CLRS2 in a course I was taking. I never found a difference other than page numbering (which was accurately reflected in the index and table of contents), so I think you're okay on that one. :-)

I paid 2€ for CLRS2 when my library threw it out. In pretty good condition, hard cover. Possibly the best deal I ever made.

A friend of mine purchased the first three volumes of TAoCP for $1 each from a sale at the UCLA engineering library and gave them to me.

They're quite scraped up and ugly, but the content is all there :)

Paper quality is apparently just one of the ways they save money. Another seems to be editorial effort.

That is the part that does not make sense, it does not seem like it would take little to any editorial effort to just reprint the book. Page numbers changing from 33 to 53 as in the OP's case make it seem effort was made but not followed through on.

If they're saving money by using cheap paper, then discarding their stock and reprinting new editions would cut into that considerably.

Maybe they're condensing it onto fewer pages or spreading it out onto more pages due to changes in page size?

Or probably they are reducing the physical page size so everything gets pushed forward. I haven't yet seen the original book so I can only speculate.

Maybe in this case, but South Asian editions are always super cheap. Physics and Chemistry books will be grayscale, so you have to try harder with some charts but otherwise they're all worth it. If I'd spent 400 dollars on every textbook I bought, my parents would've been bankrupted.

I've had good experiences with Indian editions of CLRS (though, granted, it's not the same publisher). But for TAOCP, I sprung for the real deal, a brand-new 4 volume set. I knew I'd be keeping these very books for the rest of my life, so I made sure to get the latest, high-quality edition.

Sorry, you know nothing about pricing a product.

The initial cost (paying knuth) is already paid for ages ago. The editorial work is extra for each edition, and probably paid on the local market prices.

The costs now are printing and distribution. I will guess it is cheap. Specially with local market prices.

All that is left to price the product now is how much profit you can extract from the market and still make a sale. Don't we discuss A/B testing of price here over and over?

In the USA, people can be convinced to pay $150~$800. in India they probably lose the sale if they charge R1000.

In both cases, they make the sale with the most optimum profit available at each market, while providing no real benefit for the consumers who still can't get a digital version.

Ideally you'd like to segment the market geographically like that, but with the doctrine of first sale floating out there (recently upheld in this exact contex[1]), it can be very tricky to pull off. Now pharmaceuticals on the other hand ...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Son....