Therein lies the mystery. And why do we continue to have to pay 40% MORE for books in Canada? Or thousands more for cars? Our dollar is now worth more than the US dollar, and while this is a recent phenomenon, it's been climbing steadily for several years now and there is absolutely NO reason that books should still show this ridiculous disparity in cost. There has been a lot of complaining about this in the press and online lately. A friend of mine who is a wholesale car dealer said that it almost stopped his sales dead last month as there was article after article in the paper about how much cheaper cars were in the US. This is more true for the high end than the low end, but silly people believed it and then found out that it's a lot of work to import a car from the US, and gee... it actually costs some money and maybe it's not such a good deal after all, and so then they just sat there, not buying anything at all. Things have picked up again now, but it was quite weird for a bit.
Apple, to their credit, have adjusted their prices as the Canadian dollar has climbed - at least on all newer product, anyway. Other manufacturers like Dell have also done so.
But there are other companies that continue to try to milk Canadians for all they're worth, offering really lame excuses for the disparity in pricing.
I don't know why things in Europe and the UK are so much more generally - there are higher sales taxes, real estate is generally more expensive (and rents as well, I'd guess) and labor costs may be higher and there may be really high duties on imported items, but does that result in twice as much for a computer keyboard?
