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Swiss Voters Reject Book Price Controls
New submitter hinterwaeldler writes "In 2007 Switzerland abandoned book price control (which requires publishers to fix prices for their books and forbids any dealer to sell at another price), reducing prices by 30% to 50% for online buyers. The brick & mortar book stores lobbied the parliament into creating a bill to reinstate the price fixing, against which a referendum was taken by liberals and the Pirate Party, forcing a popular vote. On March 11, after an intense debate, Swiss voters decided against book price control (German-language original) with a majority of 56%."
... because that is exactly what this initiative ("Buchpreisbindung") was aiming for. Protectionism is wrong, no matter what you name it.
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I'm just shocked that it was only 56%.
I'd have thought a greater portion of the Swiss constituency would have better sense than this.
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THANK GOD!!!
I will never ever buy an e-book that costs more than the dead-tree version. Publishers think I'm proving them right, saying e-books aren't profitable. No, I'm saying I want those publishers to go out of business.
I get more value from the Baen Free Library, and it has induced me to actually go buy a book by one of the authors, twice.
There's so much to read, I don't have time to waste on expensive stuff that turns out to be crap. If I can read a book for free, instantly, when I want to, then I will be much more comfortable shelling out my scare bucks for hardcopy or even e-books (but not at the same price as hardcopy for F's sake!)
... why on earth did this story make it into a slashdot headline?
"...a majority of 56%"
Still sounds pretty divided to me.
Although I agree with the outcome. It is simply common sense. Prices at a brick and mortar store will be higher, you are paying for the convenience of buying something immediately. Online prices will of course be lower, they don't have the overhead, however you have to wait days, weeks for your order, as well as pay for shipping.
So no I don't feel bad for the dinosaurs of industry that think they can legislate profits. @%$#^! you. If the market says we want more online stores than brick and mortar, then so be it. Quit saying the market is king on one hand and with the other lobbying government to legislate monopoly powers to manipulate the market!
What on earth do you need to fix prices on books for? I could understand the argument for things people need (milk, gasoline, electricity), but price fixing for entertainment that is not a necessity??? Nuts.
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This is going to be one of those issues that ties many liberals in knots. On the one hand, they like the idea of fighting corporate greed and collusion price-fixing, on the other hand they're big on romanticizing local mom-and-pop stores (like many of the bookstores that will be hurt by online competition). But it seems to be the inevitable direction that things are going, not just for bookstores, but for a LOT of other types of retail store. If you're a retail bookstore these days and you can't answer the question "What do you offer that Amazon doesn't/can't?" then you're probably in trouble. And if price-fixing by government mandate is your only hope, you're in a LOT of trouble.
I have to admit that I much prefer the online experience myself. But it's not just the price that attracts me, but the selection. I just bought a pair of great shoes in my weird size online that I could have never in a million years found locally. Similarly, I can find books through Amazon which would never be stocked in any of my local bookstores (which all seem to be 90% Harry-Potter-Twilight and 10% over-priced-coffee-shop these days). But your mileage may vary.
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From reading his article, he makes it seem less of a money issue (at the end of the day, it is), but more of one for increasing the amount of culture created by these small books stores. He cites Germany that has book prices fixed and how much goes on in the stores at a cultural level with spectacular events, readings, people paying just to partake in the activities. He then goes into how in the US, this is very rare and he feels it's mostly being there are no small book stores for people to have these events.
My opinion is of course, he's wrong. I think it's the culture that wants to do these things, not the fact that small book stores are around. Nothing in the United States is stopping people from putting on their own events like the ones he described in a different venue. The difference is, the two countries just have different tastes in general that aren't tied to the cost of a book and the ability to keep smaller book stores open. I don't completely rule out that more events would probably be available if there were small book stores, just because it would be easier to put them together. I think in general though, if there was a motivated person that wanted to put on a book reading and events like Germany, it would probably get the same response as a smaller bookstore doing the same thing.
He also mentions that it's a problem because the supermarkets that are putting borders out of business only carry a few of the top sellers and that the vast majority of availability of books will be lost. The level of effort to open a book store that carries many different kinds of books is actually very low, if you take into account the internet; Amazon, eBay, your own storefront which could be put together very cheaply with very low operating costs. The super market doesn't have it, the internet will somewhere. You might have to wait a day or two if it is a physical copy.
Moral of the story is, price fixing is price fixing. If you want to delve into the cultural benefits of price fixing books, how about you just organize your own book reading event, advertise by word of mouth, viral, etc, and get the cultural benefits that way. My opinion is there is more cultural benefits to people being able to afford more books to read, then a couple books with the posibility to attend events around that book.
We have fixed book prices in the Netherlands too and the result is that books are ridiculously expensive, often four to five times the price of a comparable book from, say, Britain. The end result is that I rarely buy any Dutch books and I import almost all my foreign-language books. I cannot see how this benefits anyone.
In France, a publisher fixes a book's price, and then by law, all (new) copies of that book have to be sold at that price, or with, at most, a 5% rebate.
The thinking behind this, which predates Internet of course, is that books should never become a commodity, something that should be bartered. The intention was that a book's value should not be artificially inflated or depreciated because of some commercial tactic.
While that might be a bit outdated at this time, I don't see anybody trying to deprecate this law, and to be honest, I can't see how it has harmed culture and/or literature in France...
This is not protectionism, as it also applies to any imported book — as a matter of fact it applies to any new book that is sold in the country.
It benefits your local book seller.
Do you think wholesale prices on books is regulated? (If it is you should go into bulk importation of books. In French anyhow, I doubt many phlemish books are published outside Holland.)
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The German-speaking Cantons all had majorities against the ban. The French-speaking cantons all had majorities [i]in favor[/i] of the ban. Swiss-Germans outnumber everybody else by a wide margin, so they won.
The argument for price-fixing is the same one behind the death of record stores. Remember record stores? Turns out there are a few hits out there that most people buy, and then those interested in music have wider interests, and therefore want a broader catalog to choose from. The record store business model is built on selling those hits and using some of that revenue to pay for the space to hold a broad selection and the expertise to guide customers. Even before the internet was making dents in music sales, the big labels were already running exclusive deals with Walmart and Target, sinking the record store business model. The same thing is going on with books: the competition to worry about isn't the internet; it's the big chains that can serve 80% of the market by distributing a handful of best-sellers, and screw the rest. And it's the publishers themselves, who cut deals with the big chains on their top sellers, and in so doing, contribute to killing off the market for their own books.
And yes, it's protectionism in the same way mandating broadband to rural areas is protectionism.
It doesn't benefit my local book seller, because books are so expensive that I only buy a tiny fraction of the number ofbooks I would have bought without a fixed price.
there are so many regulations that complying with them all is an undue burden on business. The recent Dodd-Frank rules have not been fully implemented but if the numbers are to be believed they are close two twenty two MILLION hours of time required to comply. This all money being spent not producing anything!
Now go add in all the tax laws, all the environmental regulations you listed, the work laws, various state and even obscure local laws, and it comes clear very quickly that it isn't that America business is non competitive by choice. The economy as with business is victim of the inability of Washington DC to get anything done.
Ever since Enron we have had one knee jerk over reaction followed by another. Worse, the same people writing the rules tend to be involved directly with those who are subject to them. Hell we even put some of the people who violate the rules into positions of power.
Subsidies and protectionism are all part of the same coin. It all comes down to using political power to protect those they like and punish those they do not like. Show me how many politically oriented families who come away from Washington poorer than they started.
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Let BuyNLarge have the exclusive to the Oprah / Today garbage du jour; that will leave talented authors to sell directly to the folks whom aren't unintentionally auditioning for a walk-on part in Idiocracy.
are not the solution to each and every economic problem
in terms of markets, open source is the ideal regulated economy, where the price for source code is regulated to be zero. From that, the wage most open source programmers get for their work is zero, too. Unless they have a product that combines open source with another commodity that pays more and thus generates income for them.
Most disturbing is that 44% actually voted FOR a bill that artificially inflates book prices...
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We still have to deal with that and don't get cheap kindle books.
You can't -lobby- a country's ENTIRE population...
Let's get Citizen Initiated Referenda all over the World! :-)
(...at least in places where there's a good, effective Bill of Rights
to protect against far Right racism being written into Law.)
It does not benefit my local bookseller, because I only buy a tiny fraction of the number of Dutch language books I would have bought otherwise. Also, due to the high prices of foreign books in Dutch shops, I don't buy any of those in the local shops too. Fixed prices greatly hurt their business.
Swiss books are REJECTED!
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