Indian Subcontinent edition

I grew up in Kolkata (aka Calcutta), India. The word "textbook" evokes the image of a usually thick, small, tightly bound paperback book with really thin pages of rough paper, and usually unaligned printing. These are very hard to turn or keep open, so we'd usually have to bookmark by folding pages.

Some of these books were published locally (e.g., the very popular math books from KC Nag), but some of them were not, and these too had the same, relatable (now nostalgic) quality of paper and print. In contrast, when I see textbooks in Europe, I subconsciously associate them to glossy magazines :) Beautiful colour charts and graphs; glossy, thick, amazing-to-feel paper (Makkhan, as we'd say in Hindi).

I'd never thought about this before, but now the Indian Subcontinent Edition - For sale in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan... notice on most of these books makes sense. I am grateful for having had access to awesome books produced at an affordable price. At this point, their feel is nostalgic, but since our schools required us to lug the required books to school everyday, I can imagine how painful it would have been to instead carry the magazine-like textbooks that IMO easily weigh 1.5-2x more than our "Indian Subcontinent editions".