The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will rule on whether enterprising re-sellers can hawk cheaper versions of textbooks, produced for students overseas, to U.S. students at a discount.

The High Court granted a writ of certiorari to John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Supap Kirtsaeng -- a case that pits a big-time textbook publisher against an enterprising graduate student and could have major implications for how much publishers charge for their textbooks, both in the United States and abroad. As is the court's standard practice, it offered no comment in agreeing to hear the case.

The lawsuit dates to 2008 when Wiley took Kirtsaeng, then a doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Southern California, to court for allegedly obtaining cheaply made foreign editions of the publisher’s textbooks and selling them to his American peers at a markup, possibly making around $1 million from the scheme in a single year.

The publisher says that Kirtsaeng arranged for friends and family in his native Thailand to ship him versions of textbooks manufactured on the cheap...