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Our goal is to have 500 followers on FaceBook and Twitter before the beginning of March, but that won’t happen without your support. Please help us make a difference in the affordability of higher education by telling people about us and how close we are to publishing a free college Algebra textbook!

Thank you, from all of us at the Dolan Foundation.

Without going into the technical details, the Supreme Court ruled on a case involving the boundaries of first sale doctrines for copyrighted material. In effect, the ruling in favor of Costco, allows retailers to purchase cheaper editions of textbooks from third parties, editions intended for distributions outside the US, which retailers can then sell domestically. Publishing companies will usually publish an edition of their texts for the US as a higher quality, more expensive version, and sell a cheaper international version, which the Supreme Court had previously barred domestic retailers from reselling. (Read more about the case)

Whether or not US editions are of a genuinely better quality or simply sold at inflated prices for nominal improved supplements is a contested issue. Suffice to say that foreign consumers are not frequently bringing the sale of poorer quality texts in their own countries to court, which would lend some weight to the opinion that publishers have unjustly inflated costs in American markets.