It's a bit apples and oranges trying to compare prices across continents but IIRC the print version of our current standards book (OVE E-8101) is somewhere around 650 Euros, the PDF version 400. This is particularly painful considering all previous editions were available free of charge because they were classified as laws. The current edition is so close to the CENELEC harmonisation documents that the state would have had to pay licence fees, which is why the practice was abandoned and you now have to pay. I think the German VDE 0100 is even more expensive. Thanks to the large number of national addenda and changes it does matter which version you buy, even though they're all based on the same HDs.
