Is it worthwhile printing Books in China and importing to USA?

1 points by dimdimdim 10y ago ↗ HN

I know that the import duty of books in US is 0% but just wanted to check if anyone has had any experience printing technical books (300 pages, 8.5x11) in China and then sell them using Amazon fulfillment? would the saving be substantial?

3 comments

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prtkgpt 10y ago ↗

It may be worth the efforts, but back in 2010, it (kind of) wasn't because of the existence of "international copy" rule. As a community college student, selling top books for top programs for top 100 Universities in USA; I sold over 100 books a day without knowing that law existed but found out about it when paypal blocked my payment of over $8k (last batch or two) for more than 6 months. From the great experience of helping top students to buy books for less (in many cases less than chegg.com) than to get stuck with your money.

If I were you now, I would definitely hire a legal freelancer (spend $50-$100) just to confirm to double check and then start. There are tons of re-publishers in China, just a google search away.

wmf 10y ago ↗

I am reminded of this story, but the book is full color and oversized so it may not apply to your case: http://kk.org/cooltools/self-publishing-cool-tools/ In his case, shipping from China was a small fraction of the printing cost so China made sense.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago ↗

A lot of the kickstarter books I get end up being printed in China.