France Moves To Protect Independent Booksellers From Amazon

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tourists often marvel at the number of rich and varied bookstores along Paris streets. Right across from Notre Dame Cathedral is one of the city's most famous independent bookstores, Shakespeare and Company. Inside, every inch of space is crammed with books and readers. The city buys buildings in high-rent districts and tries to keep a core of 300 independent bookstore by offering booksellers leases at an affordable price. 'We have to keep our identity,' says Lynn Cohen-Solal, 'because if we don't, all the shops are exactly the same in Paris, in London, in New York, in New Delhi, everywhere.' Now Eleanor Beardsley reports at NPR that the French government has accused Amazon of trying to push the price of physical books too low and is limiting discounts on books to ensure the survival of its independent booksellers. France's lower house of parliament has unanimously voted to add an amendment to a law from 1981, known in France as the Lang Law which sets the value of new books at fixed prices and only allows retailers to lower books' set price by 5%, in an effort to regulate competition between booksellers and to promote reading. Guillaume Husson, spokesman for the SLF book retailers' union, says Amazon's practice of bundling a 5 percent discount with free delivery amounted to selling books at a loss, which was impossible for traditional book sellers of any size. 'Today, the competition is unfair,' says Husson. 'No other book retailer, whether a small or large book or even a chain, can allow itself to lose that much money,' referring to Amazon's alleged losses on free delivery. Amazon spent $2.8 billion on free shipping worldwide last year to gain a competitive advantage. The bill limiting Amazon's price reductions in France still has to pass the Senate to become law. In a statement, Amazon said any effort to raise the price of books diminishes the cultural choices of French consumers and penalizes both Internet users and small publishers who rely on Internet sales."

Comments

Not Fair

[mrspoonsi]

This does not fit into Amazons plans to take over the world by selling items at cost (or below cost as is the case with some Music, and I am sure some books).

Re:Not Fair

[Joce640k]

...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.

Re:Not Fair

[pla]

...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.

...Except - They kinda don't.

Amazon crushes the local competition by offering a lower price, period.

TFA describes the situation as Amazon selling at a loss - Nothing more than cultural protectionist bullshit. Looking at the reality of the situation, Amazon has the buying power to make the publishers sell to them at a price where Amazon can sell below list and offer free shipping and still make a profit on the sale. Simple as that.


The sooner we get rid of all this regional protectionism, the better. If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business. If some buyers irrationally choose to pay more solely for your name, hey, good for you, perhaps you can survive in the shadow of those doing your own job better than you. If not... Oh well, see ya.

Re:Not Fair

[rsilvergun]

Right, because nothing bad has ever happened when regional players are put out of business. Ever.

Re:Not Fair

[AmiMoJo]

If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business.

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors. Supermarkets do this to food producers as well, which similarly has put most independent grocers out of business and made out food really low quality.

The system has failed us. We make the laws and we want diversity so that we have a choice of vendors, so it makes sense for us to fix the market. The French are merely acting to prevent Amazon becoming a monopoly.

Re:Not Fair

[clarkkent09]

The system has failed because a business charges lower prices for the exact same product than other businesses?

Re:Not Fair

[clarkkent09]

When regional players cannot compete even with taxpayer support (as these french bookstores are), then they should go out of business. Who says brick and mortar bookstores need to exist and we all need to pay higher prices for books in order to keep then artificially alive?

Re:Not Fair

[0123456]

The system has failed because a business charges lower prices for the exact same product than other businesses?

You forget. 'The system' in France doesn't exist to allow people to buy things as cheaply as possible, it exists to keep politically-connected business making fat profits at their expense.

That system will inevitably fail as the people try to sidestep it to avoid handing over their hard-earned income to politically-connected fat cats.

Re:Not Fair

[Jawnn]

The sooner we get rid of all this regional protectionism, the better. If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business.

Right, because consumer choice is so antithetical to the so-called free market...

Cue the fan boys totally not getting this....

Re:Not Fair

[jedidiah]

> I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes

I have a greatly diminished sense of smell and I can still taste differences between different varieties of tomato at a CHEAP grocery store, never mind whole foods.

You're basically trying to say that different species of plant can't be different. That's absurd of course.

Then again, there's no helping a McTomato regardless of where you acquired it.

The problem with Walmart is that they really do know their customer. They spend a lot of effort and technology in understanding what sells at each of their stores. If you are shopping at a Walmart frequented by trailer trash, you are going to only be presented with trailer trash options. Plus their whole reason for being is cheapness, not being good.

Re:Not Fair

[blackraven14250]

Whole Foods probably sells the same tomato species as Walmart, although Whole Foods will usually have more above and beyond the beefsteak.

Re:Not Fair

[AthanasiusKircher]

Amazon doesn't make anything

Actually they do. They provide a service as well. Providing a better service for less has similar results to providing a better product for less.

In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it. Whenever I've had to actually deal with Amazon for actual customer service, my generally experience has been fair to poor.

Traditional book stores often provide much richer and interesting "service," not to mention the experience of shopping, browsing, interacting with the community of local people who shop at a store, etc. That may not be valuable to you, but it is added "service." What drives most people to Amazon is not the "service," but the prices and ability to choose from a huge selection at one place. Unlike service industries that require longer extended customer interactions for any success (like dine-in restaurants), people don't really care as much about "atmosphere" or "individual attention" in buying a book. But on the few occasions when it would be helpful, it's no longer there in the same way on Amazon.

I'm not against Amazon, and I acknowledge that they do provide a sort of giant database and warehouse. But providing "service" in the traditional retailer sense? Not anything great.

Anyways, I keep hearing that luddite argument that cheap food is now low quality, but that's a big load of crap. Having to follow a renal diet myself, I have to cook my own food from fresh ingredients, and I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes.

That's not a good analogy. Whole Foods is a giant corporate structure whose goals are only marginally better than Walmart. Whole Foods isn't terrible, but its version of "organic" and "wholesome" foods is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, rather than necessarily providing a consistently better product.

I'm going to preface what I'm about to say by noting that I absolutely detest the whole "hippy" "earthy-crunchy" "love-the-earth" "buy-organic-even-though-it's-often-meaningless" garbage. I care about sustainability, but only if it's real and not some corporate crap made up to sell more expensive products. I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped "natural" or "organic" or whatever.

Anyhow, a more apt analogy for the present discussion would be buying tomatoes from either one of these bohemoths vs. buying tomatoes from a local farmer at a stand at a market or even growing your own. Tomatoes are an interesting choice to bring up, since their flavor does get altered so much when they are refrigerated and picked early for shipping. As someone who has bought fresh-picked tomatoes from farmers I know as well as grown my own, I can certainly tell the difference in flavor compared to most varieties in most supermarkets, including probably most in Whole Foods.

The reality of a traditional food distribution structure -- far from being "luddite" -- is that it actually allows food to be produced for superior flavor. I don't want to claim it's actually "more nutritious," since everybody has their own standards for nutrition. But small-scale food production does allow for maximizing flavor.

Why? Because large-scale food production requires a choice of foods that ship well and stand up to longer storage. It also requires choices made in shipment and storage conditions that may affect flavor -- like refrigeration and tomatoes, or picking them a little early before they are fully ripe.

On a broader scale, those choices actually lead to fewer choices in basic ingredients. Perhaps not fewer in your actual local supermarket, but fewer available across the country -- a decreased diversity of crops. Farmers choose breeds of tomatoes based on how fast they grow, whether they will be able to be pick

Re:Not Fair

[Austrian Anarchy]

When regional players cannot compete even with taxpayer support (as these french bookstores are), then they should go out of business. Who says brick and mortar bookstores need to exist and we all need to pay higher prices for books in order to keep then artificially alive?

Dirt-world stores do have an advantage that they seem to miss. One can pick up and look at a book in person before buying it, for example. The dust jacket can be a work of art, like the ones from Chip Kidd at Knopf, that you cannot get, and never will get on any existing digital device. Where they fall on their face is in some of their policies that worked fine a century ago, but are completely outdated now. Like demanding to returning unsold stock to the publishers.

On that last one, just think about it if you are a writer or publisher. If you have a choice between a sale being final and someone "buying" your product for three months, then shipping it back to you because they don't want it anymore, which do you choose? On eBooks, I believe Amazon Kindle gives that opportunity to the consumer, that few or no dirt-world bookstores offer, but the writer is not killed with storage fees or remainders. Not sure if they give it on physical books.

As a consumer, it is really none of my business what the seller's underlying costs are, I care about the quality of the product and the price. That is unless the government is giving the seller some of my tax money to pretend that his product is a little cheaper.

Re:Not Fair

[clarkkent09]

The point is, people are voting with their money. It may be nice to hang out at a bookstore, but the combination of lower price, vastly greater selection (as in 1000 times greater), and convenience of shopping from home obviously wins out. One justification for keeping the physical stores around Paris might be tourism but when you put it that way - i.e they are charging the taxpayers to decorate the city with bookstores - it does seem kinda silly. It's really just a preference of the ruling elite. They don't care that the books will cost more to the poor people, they are more interested in how the city looks. Just like in certain highly expensive, highly liberal, neighborhoods of San Francisco, New York etc they banned chain restaurants thereby drastically raising the average price of eating out, but it makes it nicer for the rich people to walk around without all those poor people blocking the sidewalk.

Re:Not Fair

[Scannerman]

Biggest part of Amazons competitive advantage seems to be Tax evasion.
Really hard for local businesses to compete with this.

Re:Not Fair

[icebike]

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors.

"Force" is a pretty strong word. I've never heard of an Amazon purchasing agent carrying a shot gun into a publishers office.
Amazon negotiates for a lower price on a large quantity of books. The publisher snaps at the chance to sell half a million copies at once.
Amazon sells those books taking less profit than the next retailer.

Substitute Plastic Dog Food dishes or 10 penny nails for books and the same bulk price negotiation happens.
Its the same product, distributed more efficiently.

Amazon, and any bulk buyers reduce the inefficiency in the distribution system. That's all they do.
That doesn't affect quality in any way.

What affects the quality of the food you eat is the food you choose. YOUR problem.
Make better choices.

Re:Not Fair

[XcepticZP]

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors.

Then shouldn't you rather be complaining about the publishers charging too much, period? People obviously want books for cheaper, and that's why the majority of them are buying from Amazon, instead of little bookstores. Because, according to what you just wrote above, Amazon is able to negotiate better prices from the publishers.

The system has not failed you. Just leave it be, because all you'll end up doing is distorting the marketplace. As if it isn't already distorted enough with all the government regulation and interference.

The marketplace is changing, and the only thing you don't like is what it's changing to. The fact that the consumer get's cheaper prices on the goods that he/she wants is somehow totally irrelevant to you, and people like you, it seems. It's like democracy and free-speech: You love majority rule, and hold it up as an ideal solution, but as soon as someone does something, says something, or votes differently than you with their purchases/wallet, then you start complaining and being looking for people to blame.

Re:Not Fair

[pspahn]

I would certainly hope they are both selling the same species. I don't think consumer protection laws would allow a store to tell someone they are buying a tomato when, in fact, they are buying a beet.

Re:Not Fair

[Austrian Anarchy]

The point is, people are voting with their money. It may be nice to hang out at a bookstore, but the combination of lower price, vastly greater selection (as in 1000 times greater), and convenience of shopping from home obviously wins out. One justification for keeping the physical stores around Paris might be tourism but when you put it that way - i.e they are charging the taxpayers to decorate the city with bookstores - it does seem kinda silly. It's really just a preference of the ruling elite. They don't care that the books will cost more to the poor people, they are more interested in how the city looks. Just like in certain highly expensive, highly liberal, neighborhoods of San Francisco, New York etc they banned chain restaurants thereby drastically raising the average price of eating out, but it makes it nicer for the rich people to walk around without all those poor people blocking the sidewalk.

Just like "urban renewal" and its destruction of affordable housing. What you wind up with is a neighborhood full of pretentious prissies who got their condos and luxury apartments at a taxpayer provided discount. Just so happens that the discount is not big enough for the people who used to be able to live there.

Re:Not Fair

[icebike]

...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.

People have been claiming that since Amazon when on line in 1995.
Its been almost 19 years.
It hasn't happened.

Don't you think that when a theory has been wrong for 19 years, its time to look for another theory?

Re:Not Fair

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well yeah, and in fact you can buy more than one variety of tomato at wal-mart. I often buy roma tomatoes to make salsa as roma tomatoes are a little juicier, and the roma tomatoes at wal-mart taste the same as the roma tomatoes at whole foods. Same with cherry tomatoes for salads.

You can have good things for cheap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zqe4ZV9LDs

And grats on being an elitist snob asshole who looks down his nose at people who live in a trailer. While I don't live in one myself, I happily shop at wal-mart, and there don't happen to be any trailer parks anywhere near it so I somewhat doubt they shop at that particular one - more likely they shop at the one about 20 miles east of where I live as it is much closer to them.

Re:Not Fair

[Darinbob]

Amazon is not competing fairly though in many ways, it is not a straight up competition. For starters, it got growing by providing books without any sales tax, whereas all other competitors were required by law to collect the tax (lawmakers were too worried that the fumbling internet economy would collapse if they asked for fair competition). Now that it's big, it pushes other companies out by purposely selling at a loss, by using profits from other areas to cover up the losses in the markets they're trying to control. The market place is being distorted here, but by Amazon.

Re:Not Fair

[icebike]

It is not bullshit that Amazon is selling at a loss. They have never made a profit.

As long as you don't count 15 billion gross profit as a profit.

Re:Not Fair

[AlphaWolf_HK]

In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it.

Well there's that, the fact that items get delivered fast (often the stuff they promise to me in two days comes overnight, and I don't even live near a distribution center) and the fact that returning items is dead simple and they even pay for the return shipping. Also a book I bought from them had a mangled cover, I called to complain about it and they just refunded me $35 (the book cost $80,) and they didn't even want the book back.

That's not a good analogy. Whole Foods is a giant corporate structure whose goals are only marginally better than Walmart. Whole Foods isn't terrible, but its version of "organic" and "wholesome" foods is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, rather than necessarily providing a consistently better product.

You've got that way off. Organic itself is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, it has even been scientifically proven to be so. Unscientifically as well: Look at how the girl comments on how good the organic banana is compared to the non-organic one in this video (it's short)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zqe4ZV9LDs

Only it's the same fucking banana. A few of the shoppers admit they just want organic just because of how it makes them feel, nothing to do with the actual food itself. It's like paying extra for holy water just because it is blessed, even though nothing about the water has changed. Organic is just the new age holy water.

If GMO were being used to breed better, tastier, more diverse types of tomatoes, I might actually be interested in eating them.

That's not what people actually want. You yourself might claim as such, but chances are you won't actually follow that line of thinking when it comes to your palate. Most people like a specific flavor and tend to want to stick to its distinct taste, only changing when in their head they specifically seek change, or are otherwise forced to. Most people don't consciously realize this. Coca-Cola found this out the hard way back in the 80's. Look at high fructose corn syrup. Most Americans say they want real sugar, but when they taste foods they're already used to only with real sugar instead of HFCS, they tend to prefer the HFCS taste because it's what they're used to. Pepsi actually sells their soda brands with real sugar in the US under the throwback moniker, but most people don't buy them - instead mostly foreigners and immigrants buy them because that is the taste that they are used to, which makes it profitable enough to keep on the shelves.

The banana industry went through hell when they had to switch from the gross michel to the cavendish banana. There are all kinds of different varieties of banana out there, but people just wanted the gross michel because it was the flavor they were used to. When the gross michel was killed by a fungal plague, the industry had to switch to the cavendish. Well good because as you say, people want variety right? Wrong. It sold like shit for a while until people finally got used to the new flavor.

Re:Not Fair

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Oh and in addition to what I said earlier, unlike most of the organic crowd who proclaims that their food is healthier, I actually have an objective measurement for how the food I eat affects me. Every month I get blood work and I can actually look at where all of the numbers are. While the organic guy might say he feels great eating his overpriced organic food, I can point out that my electrolytes are where they're supposed to be (except for a few, which aren't possible to balance in my case due to IGAn) and my amino acids and lipids are at levels that they're supposed to be. Not many people can actually claim that, and I'm the one who the organic crowd says eats the bad foods because I shop at walmart.

In my opinion, organic food is a fraud. I myself believe that it is immoral to sell somebody a benefit that they aren't actually getting. Does that mean I think we should ban organic food? Nope, just so long as people know what they're getting, that's ok. I'm libertarian, so I don't think people should be restricted from buying whatever makes them happy, even if I think it is crazy for them to do so. That also extends to drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and gambling, all things which I myself don't do, but think everybody should have every right to if they want it.

Re:Not Fair

[HornWumpus]

What's stopping you?

Re:Not Fair

[Clsid]

Just because somebody is poor does not make them trash. Even if you want to be an elitist there are less offensive ways to state the same thing without paiting yourself like an asshole.

Re:Not Fair

[AthanasiusKircher]

Well there's that, the fact that items get delivered fast (often the stuff they promise to me in two days comes overnight, and I don't even live near a distribution center) and the fact that returning items is dead simple and they even pay for the return shipping. Also a book I bought from them had a mangled cover, I called to complain about it and they just refunded me $35 (the book cost $80,) and they didn't even want the book back.

Amazon pays for the return shipping as long as you don't do it too often. I've never hit the threshold, but I know a few people who have. As for complaints, if you have a simple issue that's easily solved by a refund, chances are you'll get it resolved simply -- as long as it's not too much money and you don't do it too often. If you have a situation that's more complicated, don't hold your breath. (My most recent example: I downloaded an mp3 album, but three of the tracks were wrong... I mean, actually from some other CD. I complained, and after three email exchanges, I got some $5 credit or something. Except I had paid something like $30 for the "multi-CD" album, and the wrong tracks were still up on the web. I requested that they either (1) send me an actual physical copy of the album, so I could have the correct tracks, (2) refund my money completely so I could buy the physical album, or, ideally, (3) put the correct tracks up so I could download them. It's been almost a year since they told me twice that they'd look into it... nothing happened. Before that, I could cite a number of instances of weird things happening with service. And heaven help you if you buy from a 3rd-party seller through Amazon and things don't go right. Amazon customer service was great back in the late 1990s... very hit-or-miss these days.)

You've got that way off. Organic itself is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating,

Umm, duh. I don't see how agreeing with me is "way off." Notice that I put "organic" and "wholesome" in quotation marks. Note also later when I explicitly stated in my post: "I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped 'natural' or 'organic' or whatever."

I don't think we actually disagree very much here.

That's not what people actually want. You yourself might claim as such, but chances are you won't actually follow that line of thinking when it comes to your palate. Most people like a specific flavor and tend to want to stick to its distinct taste, only changing when in their head they specifically seek change, or are otherwise forced to.

Given that I actively seek out new taste experiences -- I'm the kind of person who will order the food I've never heard of before on the menu -- I think I actually WILL "follow that line of thinking when it comes to [my] palate." I discover new foods and new culinary ideas on a regular basis.

As to what "people actually want," I also tend to cook a lot for other people and introduce them to new foods or flavor combinations. Maybe they're just humoring me, or maybe it's the kind of people I hang out with, but I have seen many, many people respond to quality ingredients that might have their flavors tweaked in some ways.

On the other hand, I do also know some people who prefer the taste of crappy canned and jarred foods over those prepared fresh -- just because they're used to them. So I agree with you. I also think that the typical person who goes out of their way to shop at alternative supermarkets -- or, to get back on topic to TFA, those who actively seek independent bookstores -- are generally those looking to broaden their palates. Regardless of your Pepsi test, though, while I was living in Europe, I encountered lots of Americans who were not as adventuresome in eating as I was. Yet they too often remarked about the quality of the fresh ingredients. Just because people prefer the soda that they are addicted to to

Re:Not Fair

[AthanasiusKircher]

"Force" is a pretty strong word. I've never heard of an Amazon purchasing agent carrying a shot gun into a publishers office.

The closer a distributor gets to being a monopoly, the more producers are willing to give up just to do business with them. I agree that "force" is a strong word, but publishers who refuse to put their books for sale on Amazon these days are often going to take a big potential sales hit.

Amazon negotiates for a lower price on a large quantity of books. The publisher snaps at the chance to sell half a million copies at once.

Yeah, if the book is already marketed as a potential bestseller, your little story might actually be true.

The reality in the world is that most books only sell a few THOUSAND copies, not millions. Specialized books -- even by major university presses and such -- may only have first print runs in the HUNDREDS. Yet Amazon will still insist on taking a huge cut out of the retail price for the book -- much larger than almost any other distributor or retailer.

Just do a few Google searches, and you'll easily find stories about small publishers who are forced to LOSE MONEY on every Amazon sale if they want to market their books there. Yet some still do it in the hopes that some book might get some attention and become a big seller, and they might eventually sell enough copies of that one book to fund all the rest of their inventory.

Now, you might say -- why don't they raise the prices of their books? But that makes their books look overpriced -- and just so Amazon can take 60% of their profit. The only way to make the book reasonably priced at other sellers while still making money on Amazon would be to produce a special "Amazon exclusive edition" that's overpriced, just so Amazon could mark it down and lay claim to the majority of the purchase price... and, I'd bet Amazon wouldn't really go for that sort of thing.

Amazon, and any bulk buyers reduce the inefficiency in the distribution system. That's all they do. That doesn't affect quality in any way.

This works for small bulk buyers and wholesalers. Once a company starts showing monopolistic tendencies and deliberately driving competition from the marketplace, they can begin to make demands on producers like reduced prices. There are well-known examples of Amazon making exactly these sorts of demands on publishers.

And once producers feel like they can't refuse (because otherwise they can't market their product), they have no choice but to lower their own costs. In the process of lowering costs, quality in fact may have to decrease.

I'm all for decreasing inefficiencies in the marketplace. But the vast majority of "quality" books (e.g., specialized research, academic publications, technical books, new literature, etc.) are already produced with very slim profit margins or even at a loss at some presses (subsidized by sales of more popular things). I have nothing against popular books, celebrity bios, romance novels, genre fiction, whatever -- but I'd also like publishers to keep producing other things that may not sell a million copies. Amazon's model may in fact make it harder for those sorts of books to be produced, and it does in fact make it harder to small specialized presses to exist.

Re:Not Fair

[Miamicanes]

Booksellers (like Barnes & Noble in the US) don't necessarily make matters better. They don't seem to grasp that one of the big competitive advantages they still have over Amazon is instant gratification. The fact is, for technical books, eBooks SUCK. They shouldn't, they don't necessarily *have* to, and they probably won't suck forever... but right now, they do.

Anyway, the point is, if you need a book about something RIGHT NOW and you live in big city, try going to bn.com and searching for books that are in stock, available for immediate pickup , at a store within 100 miles RIGHT NOW. You can't. You can view them one at a time, and individually see which ones are in or out of stock at which stores, but there's no way to tell bn.com, "don't waste my time showing me books I can't buy right now near my house". It's such a simple use case, yet one that almost no brick & mortar retailer seems capable of getting right. And it's the one area where Amazon can't compete with them, on cost OR on service... at least, not until they decide to start allowing people to order online from their nearest warehouse, then drive there and pick it up. Think about it... someone who wants a book RIGHT NOW, at 8pm on a Tuesday night (or 5pm on Sunday) is going to literally pay full price for the book, and doesn't CARE how much or little it costs from Amazon. You'd think Barnes & Noble would wet themselves trying to cater to instant-gratification book buyers.

Re:Not Fair

[blackraven14250]

I posted while derp, I meant varieties, even though it should have been somewhat clear since I mentioned beefsteak tomatoes.

Re:Not Fair

[Sattwic]

The point is, people are voting with their money.

A vote which is both unequal - some people have more money to vote with, after all - and by definition corrupt - every single dollar vote you cast has a direct financial impact on you, after all. It's a fine tool for managing logistics, but completely unfit for making decisions that have long-term effects.

Thank you for highlighting this. Voting with money isn't a saint like everybody seems to think. No to sound too condescending, but again, yours was a much needed post.

Re:Not Fair

[Xest]

I agree and I've seen it here in the UK. I hate the fact that the only remaining option for books I'm interested in round here seems to be Amazon and that their prices have definitely gone up since the likes of Borders went out of business.

I wish our government had done this sort of thing quite frankly, but it's too late now, they do have a monopoly on almost entire categories of some types of book nowadays.

Re:Not Fair

[icebike]

The chart I posted is Gross PROFIT, not Gross revenue. Profit is after you pay your expenses. Gross Profit is definitely of interest.

The fact that Amazon chooses to plow its excess income back into infrastructure instead of hording cash is reflected in the stock price appreciation.

You should read your own posted links, where it clearly says:

The most confounding thing about Amazon is that it doesn't seem to want to amass much, if any profit.

Instead of collecting big profits, CEO Jeff Bezos prefers to take whatever he makes and plow it right back into the company.

The old saying that everything that is known about a company is reflected in the stock price has proven true when looked at over the course of many months or many years. The market knows the value of Amazon, even if it escapes your meager understanding of corporate finance.

Re:Not Fair

[mattack2]

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors. Supermarkets do this to food producers as well, which similarly has put most independent grocers out of business and made out food really low quality.

The system has failed us.

Amazon "forces" nothing. The publishers are selling to Amazon at whatever price BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM MONEY.

The system has not failed. Amazon is doing things more efficiently and/or better in other ways. Usually Amazon is the cheapest for something I'm searching for (including tax & shipping, if applicable). Sometimes, if it's a VERY low percentage more, I will still buy something there, because they are providing a good service (IMHO). It is ironic when I can buy from another seller through Amazon (fulfilled by Amazon) cheaper than Amazon's own price.

Typical

[puddingebola]

Just like the French to try and protect literature.

Re:Typical

[gl4ss]

to protect literature retailers.

not literature.

just like the french though, or texans(or what state was it..) .... with wine-index their books are still stupidly expensive though(wine index is similar to bigmac index, the amount it costs to buy wine at your local supermarket complex to get totally shitfaced).

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

But if the number of literature retailers is reduced to Amazon, selection is affected. If Amazon refuses to sell a book nobody can buy it. By protecting literature retailers France is protecting the selection of books and therefore literature itself.

Re:Typical

[EdZ]

Remember that Amazon is a reseller in almost all cases. Direct sales of ebooks by publishers, and even authors, can easily bypass Amazon entirely.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the French to try and protect literature.

By forcing people to pay more for books? Since there are many other ways to enjoy your spare time, consumer demand for books is very elastic, so they will certainly consume fewer books.

And since literature depends on people reading books and sharing their experiences, France is actually sabotaging literature.

Re: Typical

[Orne]

Exactly ... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books. If I have â100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

Re: Typical

[horigath]

I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.

Re:Typical

[AthanasiusKircher]

By forcing people to pay more for books? Since there are many other ways to enjoy your spare time, consumer demand for books is very elastic, so they will certainly consume fewer books.

And since literature depends on people reading books and sharing their experiences, France is actually sabotaging literature.

Actually, while I agree with you in part, I also think you're missing a fundamental part about the traditional "literary" community that France may be trying to preserve.

The actual volume of books sold does not necessarily produce a larger "literary community." If I sell a bunch of crappy Romance novels and paperback Westerns, I'm not going to produce a group of customers that are educated in traditional "literature."

Nor, for that matter, does it much matter even if I sold cheap paperbacks of Moby Dick or of the collected works of Shakespeare.

What matters in preserving "literature" in culture (at least in the traditional, canonic sense) is that certain educated people form communities that value certain types of literature.

Those are the kind of people who like to hang out in indenpedent bookshops. They like to have "deep" discussions about philosophical issues in coffee shops or recommend their favorite books, etc.

I know this is an elitist perspective, and I don't quite agree with it. But if France wants to preserve its "literary culture" (as it has been created over the past few centuries), it's not about ensuring that a poor worker can buy hundreds of crappy paperback novels or even hundreds of paperback classics that will never be read. It's about keeping smaller communities of educated "literary afficionados" around.

And to do that, keeping the independent bookshop culture is probably pretty essential... even if it means that everybody has to pay an extra couple Euros per book.

Re:Typical

[puddingebola]

Bookstores can serve as more than a point of purchase in regards to literature. I'm sure that Amazon has something to say to that in regards to their online community, but I think there is still something to be said for the physical world.

Re:Typical

[icebike]

In excess of 80,000 titles in stock seems a far cry from vanishing.

Re: Typical

[ultranova]

Exactly ... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books.

No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.

Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.

If I have Ã100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

Start with these. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.

Re: Typical

[hibiki_r]

We call that Rent Seeking. By encouraging reading despite the pricing, in essence you are saying that people should pay more on books than they'd want to spend without protectionism.

The other way to do similar rent seeking is to just get the government to foot the bill for you, and thus subsidize the product. You see that all the time in European are. Spanish movies, for instance, used to get nice laws like forcing a certain percentage of all screens in a multiplex to show Spanish movies, and the government funded movies left and right. To nobody's surprise, this meant that as long as the socialist party was in power, most subsidized movies would be about how much communists suffered in the civil war and during Franco's reign. Those movies would magically stop getting made when Spain's right wing party controlled the budget.

So what do we get with all this protectionism? Some things are more expensive than they were before, some intermediates become drastically more powerful, as their competition is outlawed, and the product is changed to match whatever the government wants. This might be better than the alternative in some cases, but I sure don't think that this is true with books. Do we have a crisis in the US due to the existence of Amazon and iTunes? If anything, it's the opposite.

Re:Typical

[Miamicanes]

As long as credit card processors will do business with you. As far as Mastercard and Visa are concerned, if you're selling eBooks, you're in the same high-risk category as pr0n sites, and treated accordingly. And the treatment isn't pleasant, unless you're into sadomasochism and enjoy arbitrary, random punishment for alleged offenses you haven't even committed.

Re:Typical

[cdrudge]

By forcing people to pay more for books?

No, from the sounds of it they aren't forcing people to pay more for books. They are preventing people from paying less for books through Amazon.

Re:Typical

[intermodal]

France's idea of protecting an idea is making it harder for the public to access that idea.

France, the last survivor of the new economy

[bussdriver]

The French seem to not be brainwashed by the propaganda machine enough to harm themselves as pro-WTO trade undermines careers in the global race to the bottom.

When the robots and software start to do significant damage worldwide to jobs (it's only just beginning and some are taking notice) the French will likely be the last holdout.

"Protectionism" is not viewed as bad everywhere; at least the marketing hasn't succeeded everywhere just yet.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Protectionism is protecting some uncompetitive businesses, not protecting the customers, clients, consumers. Not protecting customer's wallets, but protecting wallets of the uncompetitive, unsuccessful, those unwilling to adapt, restructure, change with the time. There is no virtue in that, do you know what happens with organisms that do not adapt to the changing environments?

So what happens when one organism becomes so dominant that it is threatening to exterminate all other life in the ecosystem. Case study: sea lampreys in the Great Lakes. In the business world we call that a monopoly. I have seen this 'Amazon effect' happen before. In Germany for example there was and still is a huge supermarket chain that set up shop in the district where I lived and started to underbid smaller competing businesses (i.e. lots of special discounts, bonus offers, etc...). They had tons of money and could afford to sell at a loss. They also got better prices on merchandise because they bought inventory in huge quantities. These were advantages which the smaller businesses in the region did not enjoy. This underbidding would go on for a while until the smaller supermarkets, hardware and electronics stores had gone bankrupt. Then the special offers stopped. Amazon, whether purposefully or not, is doing the same thing and I'm not sure how we are better off in a marketplace where the only big players are Amazon.com and a handful of others. Free market fundamentalists keep telling me that abusive monopolies are not a problem because they will eventually be brought down by the invisible hand of the free market. Unfortunately the invisible hand of the free market often seems to take it's own sweet time before it trips monopolists up so personally I am not particularly bothered if external forces sometimes do the invisible hand's work for it to speed things along.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[mounthood]

The French seem to not be brainwashed by the propaganda machine enough to harm themselves as pro-WTO trade undermines careers in the global race to the bottom.

Wouldn't Amazon, or a "global race to the bottom" as you call them, make these book sellers more unique? They're independent, quirky, historical, experiential, and stylish ... all of which should make them more valuable in a prefab world. More generally, won't all artisan can craft endeavors become more popular if there's a "global race to the bottom"?

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Racing to the bottom is *the entire point* of capitalism. Once some job field has been mastered, there is not nearly as much time investment required to perform that job, thus its products become cheaper. Amazon is a perfect example of this, they have mastered distribution and sales to the point that it costs them very little. If you want to make money, move on to a field that actually has some challenge remaining.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Protectionism is protecting some uncompetitive businesses, not protecting the customers, clients, consumers. Not protecting customer's wallets, but protecting wallets of the uncompetitive, unsuccessful, those unwilling to adapt, restructure, change with the time. There is no virtue in that, do you know what happens with organisms that do not adapt to the changing environments?

Let's examine Wal-Mart in the US as another example. They move into a small town, price everything sold by the competition far lower than cost, and make up for the losses through their other stores. The other businesses close down, the employees have to beg Wal-Mart for jobs at reduced pay, local suppliers and support businesses close down. Then when the competition is eliminated, Wal-Mart jacks their prices up to offset the earlier losses. Now you have a single-supplier ecosystem, fewer jobs, and to add further insult Wally-World then offshores their bank accounts and uses accounting trickery to dodge local and state taxes.

Honestly I don't know what the answer is, protectionism kills innovation and free market results in monopoly.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[mjwalshe]

They claimed that Danone (a yogurt manufacturer ) was critical national infrastructure to stop a take over :-)

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[0123456]

Had Congress protected the solar industry as well as it did a maker of motorcycles, our economy would be a bit stronger.

You don't 'make the economy stronger' by increasing the costs of things people buy. If the Chinese were dumping solar cells below cost price, American companies should have said 'give us all you got' and taken advantage of Chinese stupidity.

You probably think the US government should have kept US RAM manufacturers in business when Asian companies decided to own the RAM market years ago. Now they make a ton of RAM with tiny profit margins, while US companies make CPUs with huge margins.

You 'make the economy stronger' by concentrating on things other countries can't do. Protecting buggy-whip makers makes you weak.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[voss]

Ironically amazon supports thousands of local bookstores selling used and new books through amazon. If you want to figure out whos back this bill
dont look for mom and pop bookstores look for Carrefour and other french retailing giants. Amazons ecosystem is far more local business friendly than walmart or carrefour.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[manu0601]

But International free trade means companies of a given country compete with companies in many other juridictions, giving an edge to the one that has the lower taxes and the lower standards for environment and workers. In the end it hurts everyone except the owners of transnational corporations. We the 99% of all countries need the right balance of international trade and protectionism.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[martin-boundary]

Nonsense. There is plenty of value in protecting uncompetitive businesses. The reason is that it brings self determination.

Suppose the most competitive cars were made by Asian manufacturers. If uncompetitive American makers weren't propped up, all vehicles on American roads would eventually be small, fuel efficient, and Asian. Instead of gas guzzling SUVs, like God intended. You wouldn't be able to *buy* big cars any more. And they'd probably put the steering wheel on the other side, forcing Americans to drive on the left, like Canada intended.

And there's nothing you could do about it, because no American car makers, because uncompetitive, because protection bad. M'kay?

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[drinkypoo]

When the robots and software start to do significant damage worldwide to jobs (it's only just beginning and some are taking notice) the French will likely be the last holdout.

Sure, they will have the distinction of being the last country to fail at mercantilism. That only means they'll be the last country to adopt the next paradigm.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[Khalid]

Open source everything and crowdsource manufacturing and distribution of goods :) this is undoubtedly the future; though we will be limited by energy costs and raw material. We are heading to The Abundance Society.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[yenic]

The French seem to not be brainwashed by the propaganda machine enough to harm themselves as pro-WTO trade undermines careers in the global race to the bottom.

When the robots and software start to do significant damage worldwide to jobs (it's only just beginning and some are taking notice) the French will likely be the last holdout.

"Protectionism" is not viewed as bad everywhere; at least the marketing hasn't succeeded everywhere just yet.

I generally agree with you but you do have 1 thing wrong. When automation starts replacing the workforce en masse, the French will be the best equipped society to deal with the crisis in the only way that is reasonable: socialism. Without it, we will have a true disaster fixable only with massive depopulation.

When each has no useful ability, each will still have needs. We're going to have to learn to work together and expand the welfare state with 'free' stuff.

Re:France, the last survivor of the new economy

[bussdriver]

Protecting buggy-whip makers makes you weak... but that thinking can't extend forever, at some point protecting HUMANS makes you weak and that time is coming into view... it's no longer fantasy science fiction.

Will the French government be providing Amazon..

[Anonymous Coward]

with subsidised leases too?

Not all bad

[CastrTroy]

While I don't think that Amazon is the be all and end all of books, big stores like Amazon and Chapters/Indigo (here in Canada) have sure done a lot to bring reading back to the masses. Maybe in a large city there's plenty of market for lots of small independant book stores, but it doesn't work everywhere. I don't even think the small town I grew up in had a real book store. And it had somewhere around 12000-30000 people depending on how the mines were doing. At best we had the popular mass market paperbacks at the pharmacy or news stand. Even in the city, it's nice to go to one store and be able to browse thousands of books from all kinds of genres. The ability to order basically any book you want and have it at your front door in well under a week has helped immensely. They have also helped bring down prices quite a bit. With a bunch of independant book stores, nobody had the clout to push publishers for lower prices, so the price on the cover was basically the price you paid. No it's not uncommon to see hardcover books for less than half their cover price. The price of a paperback hasn't risen that much, even though many items have gone up in price. Looking at old books from the thrift store, I find it kind of interesting that prices have only gone up by a couple of bucks in the past 20 years.

Re:Will the French government be providing Amazon.

[Anonymous Coward]

The French government already has agreements with Amazon to subsidize it each time it creates a new job (between 3400 and 5000 euros per job)...
http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2012/11/27/amazon-aide-publique-subvention-fisc-impots-france_n_2197220.html

Oh, and Amazon doesn't pay taxes in France, but in Luxemburg, contrary to the bookshops.

Actually, instead of adding yet another layer of regulation that will soon be circumvented, the governement should just:
1) stop subsidizing Amazon (they would open the logistics platform anyway, given their market share).
2) come up with a credible scheme for multinational Internet companies to pay their taxes.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Joining Yet Again]

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter". I have no problem with people choosing to use an e-reader, but it'll be a dark day in civilisation when the written word is only recorded digitally.

What I'm most happy to see here is France understanding that the country is really a geographical area owned by a government on behalf of the people, with various rights and responsibilities assigned to inhabitants in a way which suits the people. I am required to respect private law merely as a result of being born, and there is even better reason to require me to respect public law.

Re:In other news...

[gbjbaanb]

I guess if Amazon had paid some taxes in France they might be a little more amenable to keeping the status quo, but as we know they make absolutely no profit, oh no, honest, then France couldn't really care less if they were regulated out of existence.

It has little to do with progress.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit.

-Book prices are not higher in France than in the US. Of course, there are all sort of books, with very different prices.
-Prices are not "inflated". They are fixed by the editors, not by the government, not by Amazon. If an editor wants to sell its books, I guess that it must have competitive prices.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[CRCulver]

I see plenty of people reading in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books. people are reading on tablets, ebook readers, computers, even phones.

Sure, people still read, but they read less serious literature than they used to. The entire West is becoming a post-literary culture. France, with its intelligentsia's concern with protecting high culture, is trying to resist that. Paris bookshops tend to stock genres like poetry and drama which are not making the transition to e-books like mass-market novels.

. I'd be concerned if there were some unique paper books that would never be put into electronic form, but even those books are being converted to electronic readable formats.

No, they aren't. If a book is out of print but under copyright (perhaps it is unclear who the rights belong to), it is not being digitized and made widely available to those with e-readers. A huge amount of publications, which would have its audience if it were brought back out of print, is being lost to the digital generation. I participate in the ebook filesharing scene, and for a lot of 20th-century literature, we the community have to undertake the digitization process by ourselves because no publisher wants to deal with the rights situation.

This is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm French, and I can tell you this defense of the "paper books" is horrible. In France, e-books are typically MORE expansive than paper versions. How could that be possible? How can you argue that you make literature more accessible by imposing a minimal price?! I'm not a very "the free market will take care of you" kind of guy, but in that instance, it's just the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Re:This is backwards

[hjf]

How can you argue that you make literature more accessible by imposing a minimal price?!

Because, like the FUCKING SUMMARY said, Amazon has very, VERY deep pockets. They are so big, they will do anything they can, legally, to capture the market (which is a nice way of saying "destroying competition").
Amazon can put a kiosk in the sidewalk in front of a physical store and give away the same books in the store. And keep doing that until the store goes out of business. This is basically what they do when they sell books at 90% discount with free shipping. No other bookstore can do that. This is what's called "unfairness".

But let's suppose you don't care for that. There's also the issue of amazon wanting to go all digital. Amazon is all for efficiency and they would just love to sell just kindle books, not physical ones. What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world. Very accesible, right?

And of course, let's not forget about all those "banned" books. Are there any banned books in France? I don't know. Will there be? With the growing muslim population there, YES.

Re:This is backwards

[cHiphead]

With the growing muslim population there, YES.

Ah, there it is. The penultimate argument you can make. Post-modern racism.

Re:This is backwards

[radish]

What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world.

And what would happen to them without Amazon? If they're in a "grey area of copyright" no-one's going to reprint them either. The copies which exist today are all the copies that will ever exist, scattered in a few libraries until they run out of shelf space and the librarian dumps them in a landfill. If someone does own the copyright and have access to the manuscript it's a LOT cheaper to give that to Amazon/whoever as an ebook than do a small run of physical copies. The likelihood that the content would be preserved in electronic form is MUCH higher than in physical form.

You seem to believe that because people like to consume new books electronically they're somehow suddenly incapable of reading paper - that if an hold book only exists physically it's "lost". I don't understand that at all. Old books are no worse off, new books are much better off (because the cost of duplication is now zero, there will be more copies).

Re:This is backwards

[damienl451]

How is this any different from the present situation? Do you think that Amazon will print books that have gone out of print because they were too old and are being kept in copyright limbo by the publisher? Do you think that independent booksellers carry those in their inventory? Obviously not since no publisher will want to reprint a book whose copyright status is not clear. That leaves used copies, which Amazon also sells. Your argument makes no sense whatsoever: if a publisher wants to keep a book in print, they can do so whether they go all digital or not. But if a book turns out to be unprofitable, which version is more likely to remain available: the print version that must be kept in a controlled environment and will take up valuable shelf space, or the electronic version that can be sold at near zero marginal cost?

Your last sentence is also fact-less bigoted drivel.

Re:This is backwards

[hjf]

Sure. "Racism". Because muslim countries are truly "free" and literature of all kinds is readily available for both men and women alike.

Malala Yousafzai is a liar.

Re:This is backwards

[hjf]

It's one thing to be preserved in a peer-to-peer, or non-profit archive.

It's a completely different thing to be preserved in a centralized server, owned by a company that might as well go bankrupt tomorrow, and won't bother releasing all those books anyway.

Re:This is backwards

[hjf]

Amazon doesn't sell used books. They have a marketplace of independent sellers who do that. For a minimum profit. They also bought the largest used books marketplace, Abebooks.

My last sentence is real and you're just blind if you don't believe it. Just look at all the muslim countries. Alcohol is prohibited. Pornography is prohibited. And they can easily ban anything they want. Stupid theocracies run by fanatics. I'd like it to be just a lie, or just a bad apple among the muslim countries. But it's not the case, all muslim countries have degenerated into the middle-aged shit you see today.

Re:This is backwards

[hjf]

Also, I forgot, many of these books are published by small editors. In Argentina you have a ton of libraries in Corrientes street in Buenos Aires. Some are big chain stores, others are small independent. The independent ones are highly specialized. Some sell only used books, others only sell legal books. Some sell books in english, others sell only books about poetry, arts, comic books. There are even huge collections of vintage porn magazines. And if Buenos Aires has a lot of libraries, I don't want to imagine what it would be like in Paris, London or any other european capital.

Believe me, there is an impressive, just impressive collection of things out there that only exist in physical form because there's no manpower to catalog them. Let alone re-edit in digital form.

I forgot to say: Amazon's non-english catalog is a joke. Online shops in Argentina are huge compared to what Amazon has to offer. And that's another problem: amazon will only operate where it's profitable. Nothing keeps them from destroying a market somewhere, only to find it just doesn't work, and pack their things and leave.

Re:This is backwards

[blackraven14250]

France isn't a theocracy. It'd take much more than one man's decree to ban things the same way Muslim countries do. On top of that, having a large group of Muslims ban things based on their beliefs isn't bad - it's only bad when it's forced upon a large group of other people. I think it's a shitty way to live, but they're more than welcome to have their own non-fun in their neck of the woods.

Re:This is backwards

[hibiki_r]

I don't know if you realize that in many parts of Europe, even bookstore chains are regulated so that they don't outcompete the small bookseller. Many countries have rules that stop stores from opening too long, and there are things like minimum prices.

Remember Borders? A chain that couldn't compete in the US would be banned in some parts of Europe for being too competitive!

Re:This is backwards

[CRCulver]

Just look at all the muslim countries. Alcohol is prohibited.

Have you actually travelled in "all the Muslim countries"? Alcohol is widely available in the majority of Muslim countries, especially ones that have contributed immigrants to France (Algeria may be the sole exception).

Stupid theocracies run by fanatics.

Of the Muslim countries that have contributed immigrants to France, Morocco is a kingdom whose king has an uneasy relationship with fanatical clerics and wishes they would go away, while the West African countries are by and large secular kleptocracies, and Algeria came out of a civil war by privileging neither Islamist nor leftist parties.

Certainly the inability of some French immigrants to integrate (and for second generations to feel torn between two cultures) is a valid concern, but if you want to take any productive steps toward that problem, you have to understand the situation first. Your understanding of the Muslim world is a caricature.

Re:This is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm French, too.
There is no "minimal price". The publisher is the one that sets the price. If he wants to set the complete LOTR at 0.99€, he can.

The law forces BOOKSELLERS to ALL sell AT THE SAME PRICE (with a 5% discount allowed) to the consumers. This law have been around long before Amazon, back when it was Leclerc and Carrefour that used to threaten libraries.

And France isn't the only country where ebooks are as expensive or more than physical books. It has nothing to do with this law, it's just that publishers want to increase their margin by selling at the same price books that cost nothing to duplicate.

Re:This is backwards

[Godwin O'Hitler]

In France paper books are ridiculously expensive, and neither physical nor Internet bookstores are allowed to sell them cheap. It's a publishers' price fixing cartel sponsored by the govt., and it's not new by any stretch of the imagination. And they must be in league with the other French speaking countries because you can't buy them cheap in Belgium or Canada either.

Don't take my word for it. Go look at the price of "Fifty Shades of Grey" then at the price of "50 nuances de Grey".

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[darkHanzz]

The way most pocket books are printed is at least as wastefull as an E-book. Those pocketbooks will only last a few decades at best, given the cheap paper they're made of.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[turbidostato]

"in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books."

On one hand, losing the ability to read without a hugh tad of supporting technology may be a problem on itself.

On the other, the problem exposed here is not paper versus electronic books but the risk of Amazon trying to become a de facto monopoly as the dumping practice, if it's true, would suggest.

Do you remember that one of the short list of things a government should do, even on the most liberalist wet dreams, is to put an eye on monopolies, right?

I love to read

[the eric conspiracy]

When I was young teen I used to ride my bike to a used bookstore and buy cheap used paperbacks for 50 cents. Loved it. As I got older I moved to an area that had only regular bookstores, and the books were 10-50 times more costly. So I couldn't read as much.

Now though with eBay and Amazon I can get cheap books again. So I can afford to read again.

I guess if I want to be able to keep reading I'll have to stay out of France.

Re:I love to read

[the eric conspiracy]

> Pfft. Nice attempt to troll. If you wanted to read more, you could use the library.

I guess you never were a serious reader.

The fact is I read the entire contents of several sections of my Public Library. That was exhausted by the time I was 13.

Re:I love to read

[Zironic]

Have you heard about this newfangled institution called a library?

Re:I love to read

[Aboroth]

Every library I've ever known is a member of an inter-library loan program, giving you access to the collections of many other libraries. All you need to do is ask for it. This has been very widespread and common for a few decades now. Even if they didn't have that, you can always ask them to purchase the book for their collection, so you can read it. They have a portion of their yearly budget dedicated to buying new books, and librarians are happy to help you get what you want if you ask. It even makes part of their job a little easier since they have to figure out new books to buy anyway. You could see a good book in a bookstore, then ask your library to get it for their collection.

Re:I love to read

[AmiMoJo]

eBay and Amazon are not always cheap for used books though. People have discovered that they don't need to compete with the lowest priced sellers because there is a finite supply of used books. They can price their books at a level which makes them a reasonable profit and simply wait months, maybe years for supply to run out and someone to be willing to pay. The only caveat is you need a large and extremely cheap warehouse to keep all those books.

Re:I love to read

[AmiMoJo]

Replying twice because I noticed something else about your post. What appears to have happened is that the new bookshops squeezed out the used book shops in the are you now live. Well, not just the new book shops, it is more of a general trend where popular shops push up rents in some areas, so that only other popular shops can afford to be near them, and in the end every town is just a clone with the same chain stores dominating.

At least there is more than one bookstore near you. In the UK the only major high street book seller is Waterstones now. It sounds like the French are trying to stop Amazon being the only place to buy books, period.

Re:I love to read

[BorisSkratchunkov]

Parisian book stores (Gibert Jeune, Shakespeare and Co) are not ridiculously expensive. When I was a student at Paris 3 I was able to buy all of my textbooks for under 100 euros (compare to prices paid for American textbooks; also note that some of those textbooks were unnecessary supplements that I bought out of curiosity). Most individual books range between 5-10 euros, and, scaled for the cost of living, most bouquinistes (you know, the people who sell used books) had decent prices (especially considering that some of the books in their selection were rare and/or out of print). The used bookstores that you speak of very much have an analogue in the bouquinistes.

If you want to stay out of France, France will not miss you.

Re:I love to read

[Tom]

Maybe you can buy a few books less, but in exchange some workers can actually feed their families and also buy books. Ask the minimum wage temp workers in Amazons warehouses if they'd rather work in an old-style bookstore for two or three times the wage.

Unless you come up with a new technology or a new method of doing business, there are very few ways to actually provide the same service for less money - but what you can do is distribute costs differently. You can pay your workers less and be cheaper for the customers. Or you can save on health and safety, again workers will pay the price when something happens. Or you can do the usual corporate trickery to avoid paying taxes, so the general public pays the money you save (because someone else has to pay the taxes you don't). I could go on.

Amazon has done some cool things, especially when it comes to making next-day delivery the norm instead of a week or two. But they aren't a white knight.

Re:I love to read

[0123456]

Maybe you can buy a few books less, but in exchange some workers can actually feed their families and also buy books.

They could feed their families more easily if prices weren't kept artificially high to keep buggy-whip makers in business.

Re:I love to read

[Tom]

You completely ignored the rest of my comment, which puts down your argument. Buggy-whip makers were put out of business by technological progress. Amazon hasn't invented any new technology. Their innovation is on the business side, and business innovations almost always shift costs around, as I explained.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Bobakitoo]

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter".

It is not just slightly lighter, you can hold thousand kilograms worth of books in your pocket. The resource intensive and massive centralized infrastructure is only due to digital restriction management. DRM free book do not have this problem. Essentially, what you are saying is that electronic book are defective by design, but we can fix this and save paper in the process. Don't dismiss new technologies because of a few political glitch.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[DiamondGeezer]

Whereas an e-book reader should last for centuries.

A large enough company

[Anonymous Coward]

Can operate on several markets, and chose one to work at a loss for years.

In the end, all operators on that "at loss market" will go bankrupt apart from that large company (because it can keep subsidizing that market with the profits of all the other markets it is on).

That will make the company become a de-fact monopolist by the way it uses it's size to steamroll all competitors to oblivium.

And that has nothing to do with "free market".

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a 1940's science book in my jacket pocket. Will the Ereader book be usable in 5 years?

Re: I see plenty of people reading

[CRCulver]

You sir... are an idiot. I'd counterpoint all your arguments but I'm much too busy reading old out of print books on my Nexus 7.

20th-century out-of-print books still under copyright where it is unclear who the rights holder is? If you are reading them on your Nexus, it's because you got them from a filesharing site.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Elbereth]

There was never a golden age of literature when everyone read authors that meet your approval. If people are reading more breezy escapism and genre fiction today than they were before, I'd look at why they feel they need that escapism. Anyway, even a hack can write a pretty good book every once in a while -- especially given that most hacks are unnaturally prolific.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[hobarrera]

"slightly lighter" to a SINGLE book. Plenty of people have to carry many books to, for example, the university. I walk about 2.5km and back every day to uni. Carrying a bunch of books with me is out of the question - it's just not good for my back.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[c-reus]

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years? I highly doubt that; it's more likely that I'd have to pay multiple times to shift the books from one format to another in order to access them with the e-readers available at that time. The popupar format is epub/mobi today, it's likely to be something else as technology progresses.

Will we witness a planned obsolescence as has happened multiple times with console games? PS1 games can nowadays only be played using an emulator (if you can't find a real PS1 console, that is). The PS1 games people had are naught but frisbees.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[lxs]

DRM laden books do need all that. Uncrippled books do fine without.

meanwhile...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

downloading books for free...

Re:Free Market Economics

[drooling-dog]

You're upside-down on this, aren't you? They already have a free market for books, and your implied criticism is that they don't want it replaced with a monopoly (and a foreign one at that).

And here we arrive at the central contradiction of what you call "free" markets. They will always tend toward monopoly (or collusion among oligopolies, which is essentially the same thing), because monopoly profits are always higher than the sum of profits in a competitive market. It's always worthwhile for the big fish to buy out the little fish, and it's equally worthwhile for the little fish to sell.

Is there a libertarian answer to this? How is an economy of free markets to be preserved when they naturally tend toward monopoly, and the society as a whole is ideologically barred from interfering with that process? Or is economic libertarianism really a crypto-philosophy promoting the interests of those few who benefit from monopoly?

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[mounthood]

The resource intensive and massive centralized infrastructure is only due to digital restriction management. ... Don't dismiss new technologies because of a few political glitch.

Why should we assume DRM can be fixed at the political level when all experience points to the powerful successfully abusing government? Put another way, if we live in a DRM free world one day it wont' be because of the US, but because of India, China, Brazil, et al.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[EdZ]

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years?

Unless you're foolish enough to lock yourself into DRM, I don't see why not. Nearly 30 years on (well, 28) and Amiga software can be run in emulators from discs that have been format-shifted. And Amiga-specific files can and have easily been converted to new formats. Except for regular old text, because that still works fine. Or HTML, because that still works fine. Or BMP, because that still worms fine.
If a format works and does it's job, it'll stick around after many hardware and software changes. Calibre already makes it trivial to move between epub and mobipocket (and go to and from RTF, PDF, etc) so I don't see you suddenly being unable to read your library even in 40 years.

Race to bottom paid for the computer you typed on

[JoeyRox]

People love to selectively pick 'n choose which benefits of free market capitalism they allow themselves to enjoy and which they wag their fingers at with disdain and want eliminated. Problem is, other people may have an exact opposite set of priorities as you and push to have your luxuries eliminated instead. It can't work both ways. This is why free markets have done more to support personal liberties and choice than all the other failed 'personalized' ideologies combined. Don't tell me what I can buy and enjoy and at what price and I'll return the favor to you.

Re:In other news...

[damienl451]

But prices are higher in France for best-sellers, which is what really matters for most people. Take Plonger, the latest recipient of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. It's a 448-page hardcover book that retails for EUR19.95. Now take Eleanor Catton's "The Luminaries", which received the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It retails for GBP9.49 in the UK (EUR11.12) or USD16.74 (EUR12.12) in the US. That's almost twice as much, for half the number of pages.

But perhaps the difference is due to them being two different books, and very recent ones.

So you can also compare translations of the same book: let's have a look at 1Q84. In the US, you can get the paperback version for USD13.10 (EUR9.49). In France, you can get it for EUR9.12. So it's about the same price. Except that the French version only has Book 1, and Book 2 and 3 cost the same price. Which means that the book is three times as expensive.

Obviously, you can find other, less popular books that are cheaper in France than abroad. So there's no across the board increase in prices, you're right. However, there are distributive effects that should be taken into account. If niche (read: more intellectually rigorous) books are more affordable, this primarily benefits higher-educated, wealthier consumers. In practice, the French model asks the masses to subsidize the consumption habits of the educated rich.

internet is top free market, has billions of pages

[raymorris]

The most free market of all markets is the internet, where anyone can readily access any site, anywhere in the world. (Save a very few totalitarian countries with national firewalls.)

You claim free markets lead to monopoly. Therefore, the most free market system, the internet, has only one web page, correct?

Choice leads to differentiation, my friend. In a free market, I can choose Walmart pants and you can choose Abercrombie. Both serve a section of the market and both thrive. A government controlled market is the market for a driver's license. Government control is monopoly (and the DMV serves it's customers SO well).

In some areas of the US, the government enforces a monopoly on internet access, and you get 5-10 Mbps for $55. In Texas, it's mostly free market and we get Google's gigabit fiber, two cable providers, DSL, wireless, satellite, all kinds of choices.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Shompol]

I've got a 1940's science book in my jacket pocket. Will the Ereader book be usable in 5 years?

I currently have my metric ton of paper books dumped in a storage somewhere I cannot easily reach. Most of them are obsolete textbooks and some are priceless physics and calculus books in a language my children will not be able to read. On a rare occasion I need one of them but it is now too difficult to fetch them at will.

To avoid repeating this situation I only buy ebooks now, and unlike their dead wood counterparts, yes, I will have all of them in 5 years, taking up 0 living space, in a searchable format.

On a side note, I only buy non-DRM or books where I can rip DRM. Don't feel like renting books disguised as buying.

lol. He's the editor!

[raymorris]

That's funny. Obama's the lead editor on the new Constitution, I understand.

This act is CRIMINAL in the EU

[Anonymous Coward]

France has no legal right to pass such laws, under the rules of the EU- rules that OVERRIDE all national Laws, unless said country withdraws from the Treat of Rome.

However, when Tony Blair rose to power, on of the first things he did was to meet with the leaders of senior EU nations, and state that they should, collectively, accept that they were above the EU rules, and ignore them when it suited. He pointed out that this is how the UN works (Britain, France, USA, Russia and China are effectively lawless nations at an International level, because each of the five is SOLE judge as to their own possibility illegality).

The leaders of France, Germany and Italy jumped at Blair's suggestion, and the EU began a VERY different course.

Many sheeple get VERY confused at the adherence of many countries to the EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS, being so thick that they thing the ECHR is part of the EU. It is not. Countries sign up to Human Rights Treaties in a completely DISTINCT act from signing to the Treaties of Rome. However, it is a general expectation that EU members are also nations that place themselves in the jurisdiction of the Human Rights court, although Blair is moving heaven and Earth to change this situation. Blair's problem is that even senior legal figures that are Blair's loyalists CANNOT understand how withdrawing from Human Rights courts could be sold to the sheeple.

Meantime, Blair simply advises each nation to ignore their responsibilities, and pass national laws that break the higher rules and laws, DARING those responsible for upholding these International Laws to do anything about it, given that they are ALL political appointees by the member nations, and can be individually ruined if they cause 'trouble' (see that senior French figure falsely accused of rape in NY, to punish and ruin him for not playing ball with France's zionist leadership).

Ireland illegally ignores the conventions that protect the Rights of children and families, and allows the extremely abusive Catholic Church to run ALL schools in Ireland, and directly interfere with the operation of the Irish parliament. France and Italy have passed many Laws intended to directly persecute ordinary, Law abiding Muslims (laws, ironically, that could NEVER be passed in the UK or USA, because English-speaking nations recognise FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE, whereas, despite the principles of the ECHR, non-English EU nations do not).

The protectionist laws are against the founding principles of the EU. The EU, first and foremost, sets up a unified trading zone, where no nation may act against any partner nation, in such a way that limits that partner more than their own nations, or interferes with free trade principles amongst partners. Price-fixing (in the internal market) is illegal. Blair's acts ensured it might as well be legal.

Blair's tactic was to use the stupidity of the sheeple against them. So politicians price-fix under the "we've got an excuse" mechanism. The 'excuse' doesn't make it lawful, but the sheeple have NO CONCEPT of EU law, only what the mainstream media convinces them seems right and reasonable. So Scotland (which Blair has arranged to TEAR from the Union shortly) fixes the price of booze (the PRICE not the tax, which is a separate issue). France fixes the price of books. And every nasty extremist racist nation that is now being added to the EU is taught, by example, that joining the EU is NOT an act of making nations more civilised and reasonable, but a game of pure power.

The EU is just another war-mongering gang, lawless and murderous like the USA. Blair wants to ensure that the direction he has taken the EU gives the Russian bloc and the China bloc no choice but to fully prepare to carve out their part of the planet with the upmost ruthlessness themselves. The EU is being crafted into a global wartime entity- the very opposite to why it was first founded out of the ashes of WW2.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[mlts]

E-Books are nice, and yes, I have more than one e-book reader. However, paper books have their place for a few ways:

First, if there is a power issue, paper books are still legible in daylight. If the battery runs out on by e-book reader while I'm camping, either I use an external charger or I'm not reading books until I come back to my vehicle or civilization.

Second, DRM. There is nothing stopping book publishers from denying access to one's title list unless a monthly fee was paid, charging by the page or adding additional fees. Think a lawsuit might help? Nope, that EULA was auto-accepted when the app was ran after the update. Of course, books can disappear from readers, just like 1984 did for a period of time. And if done, there is nobody to stay otherwise.

Third, incompatible formats. Kobo, Scribd, Kindle, iBooks, Google Books, Nook, Sony. The formats might be similar, but the DRM is different. The closest thing to a "rosetta stone" is probably an iPad because it can read all those formats. Of course, one should get their books from one e-book store, but sometimes one place may have books another one doesn't.

Fourth, backups. With DRM-ed copies, it might be a backup and restore will not be an option due to the app phoning home for authorization.

e-books are great, as I can carry one device with thousands of titles on it. However, it won't replace paper books.

Of course, it would be nice for Amazon or the big names to sell the e-book and the paper book at one price. That way, I can go download all the relevant stuff I need, and in a few days, have the paper books for the library bookshelf. Best of both worlds.

Good for the French !

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon will abuse its power once it has attained monopoly status as
a supplier.

I have never once bought anything via Amazon and I never will.

Actually, I'd like to see Jeff Bezos get terminal cancer. He is a despicable
little parasite and the world would be better off without him.

good job!

[stenvar]

So a bunch of wealthy Parisians get to shop in pretty bookstores, while the rest of France pays inflated prices to Amazon, increasing their profit margins. This is win-win for special interests and the wealthy.

Re:Will the French government be providing Amazon.

[AmiMoJo]

The EU is moving to ensure multinationals pay tax based on where they do business, not where they are incorporated or based. The rule will pretty much be this: If you make money in an EU country you pay a an equivalent proportion of corporation tax in that country, regardless of any clever licensing set ups or tax dodging arrangements you have in place. It's a kind of "no bullshit, referee's word is final" law.

no, books are dirt cheap

[ciaran_o_riordan]

If it takes me 24 hours to read a book, and I pay full price, let's say 8 euro, that's 33 cents per hour. The price could be doubled and it would still be one of the cheapest pass times around. Your investment of time is always bigger than your cash investment for reading a book, so I reckon most people who complain about high book prices actually need to look at their overall spending. ...and you can sell the book 2nd hand afterward, and you can swap it and get a book for nothing.

George Orwell wrote a good piece about this:

http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/books-vs-cigarettes/

Bravo, France!

Re: I see plenty of people reading

[AmiMoJo]

Copyrights are not as long as the US in many parts of the world. In the EU there are many 20th century books out of copyright now.

Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

"Amazon said any effort to raise the price of books diminishes the cultural choices of French consumers and penalizes both Internet users and small publishers who rely on Internet sales."
If Amazon would pay the taxes they should this would not be problem. But since the American government is allowing this illegal behavior, since no management have gone to prison for tax fraud, people, culture and society will suffer.

Re:internet is top free market, has billions of pa

[Anonymous Coward]

> Therefore, the most free market system, the internet, has only one web page, correct?

Yes, it's Google. The concept is not about physical availability. It's about perception.

Re:Look at all the hate

[inhuman_4]

A market captured by a monopoly is not a free market. That is why Standard Oil (88% of the market), etc. Had to be broken up. It has nothing to do with "jealous little creatures".

Parent is misinformed

[DavidMZ]

Fixed price on books apply only to new books. Walk along the Seine and you will find plenty of cheap second-hand books. And it is a lovely promenade.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[ultranova]

Meh. Paper books are heavy and take up a lot of space. Good riddance. Protecting paper book sellers is like protecting buggy whip makers when everyone is buying automobiles. How long can you try to hold off progress?

You comparison fails, because paper books are superior in many ways:

1. 1) I can read them without electricity or a reading device.
2. 2) I can read them without requiring permission from a licensing agency.
3. 3) I can resell them.
4. 4) Most are still readable after decades or even centuries.

Electronic books are fragile, by their very nature dependent on a lot of infrastructure, both technical and social. Paper books are robust and require nothing but a relatively simple skill from the user. It would be foolish to risk losing access to knowledge following a breakdown, especially as future seems increasingly uncertain.

Re:Free Market Economics

[drooling-dog]

You mean *you* have nothing more.

And there's nothing "socialist" about recognizing that markets don't stay free and competitive by themselves, when all of the incentives are working against it.

Bookstores

[Cutterman]

Yeah, I've noticed it in Cape Town too. Bookstores are closing or downsizing. There are fewer serious books and more "bestsellers", chick-lit, and dumbed-down stuff. I have fond memories of sitting at my stammtisch in my favourite cafe in the 60's reading French paperbacks and cutting the pages as I went. Cutting the pages: a lost experience... Ho hum. Mac

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[rolfwind]

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter".

I think making paper and ink, printing and distributing books, and then moving them over and over again, sending them, keeping them in libraries that are heated/air conditioned to some degree, etc are probably quite a bit more resource intensive per book. Newspapers more so. And you know the stories about airlines saving a pound per passenger in some way, unnoticeable to the individual or even all that much per flight, but saving millions per year? I bet the individual transport of books vs ereaders works the same way on gas.

The resource cost per book is linear. Each book adds rougly the same among per page. E-book have a big upfront resource cost for each ereader, and then it sinks down to almost nothing per book.

And yes, an ereader requires some energy to read. But considering a good amount of time some lighting is required to read, the ereader is quite neglible in comparison.

I too, will be sad when things are only digital. But it's more to the nature of copyright vs the nature of digital itself. But I think purely resource wise, you are on the wrong side of the debate. I can't see how paper wins over books in that scenario. The extreme case would be newspapers, and the gas in aggregate that is saved by so many people not picking one up, carrying one around, recycling, getting one delivered on a daily basis, etc must be enormous.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[rolfwind]

I have books from the 1880s that are just falling apart despite decent storage. Can they be copied flawlessly or will the damage alway be apparent? And how much effort to copy them well?

No, No, No!

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you can survive in the shadow of those doing your own job better than you. If not... Oh well, see ya.

Apples and oranges, buddy.

Amazon is a distributor. They don't write or publish books. They don't MAKE anything. They're just strong arming the distribution system for short term personal gain without any concern for the larger effects on the eco system around them.

When you impoverish thinkers, writers and publishers, you take away energy from them, make it more difficult for them to have an impact on their world. This in turn makes it easier for the powers that be to control the message, rewarding soap box time only to those who play by the rules.

And as always, the so called, "Free Market" is touted as the noble reason behind this tactic. The Jungle was also free, but until the little monkeys got together to learn how to regulate their environment, they kept getting eaten by tigers.

Fuck tigers, and Fuck Amazon.

Re:No, No, No!

[clarkkent09]

It's amazing what a bad job our schools are doing in explaining the basics of free market economy. Free market is nothing like jungle. In the jungle the you survive through physical force, in the free market you survive by serving your customer better than the other guy. The "power" Amazon has comes from serving A LOT of customers who voluntarily give it their money. They do it not just because of the price, but also because of selection and convenience. If people wanted to buy from French book stores, they wouldn't need taxpayer subsidies and laws passed to protect them.

Re:No, No, No!

[jedidiah]

...and part of that relates to how large your corporation is. If you have more money, you can use that money in order to be a bully. It's the capital in capitalism.

The fact that Amazon has "earned" this position doesn't alter the fact that they could be abusing it and harming the overall market.

As a corporation, they are by definition trying to destroy the market. That's what corporations do. That's why capitalism can't be left completely alone. It will implode otherwise. Both it's fans and it's detractors acknowledge this.

Re:No, No, No!

[icebike]

Explain how this bullying works.

Amazon and small corner book store walk into a publisher's office....

Are you claiming that Amazon takes out a steamer trunk full of money and beats the publisher to a bloody pulp with it until they they get a cheaper price?

If the corner book stores get together and order in bulk they too can get the bulk purchase price. It takes a lot more of the publishers time and money to package 15 copies, box and ship them for 500 corner books stores than it takes to fork-lift pallets upon pallets into a semi trailer or rail car.

One electronic order, one printout, one fork lift operator can handle 40 thousand books in half an hour, vs thirty mail clerks picking and packaging weighing, labeling, and mailing 500 different boxes to 500 different stores.

In fact, dealing with corner book stores is such a hassle the publishers don't even do it at all. They farm that task out to jobbers, who get the same prices as Amazon, but those jobbers have salesmen, packers shippers, order clerks to employ. There is a whole additional layer of inefficiency and greed involved in handling the corner book store.

Stop calling it bullying. Its called efficiency of scale.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Shompol]

I can play my old games on Dosbox on Linux. Once this happened I expect to play them in 40 years on the hardware of the future, because dosbox is opensource all that is needed is a trivial recompile.

With non-DRM'd books this is not an issue at all. I just opened an epub book with Emacs and it is human-readable even in raw data format.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[CRCulver]

EPUB is an XML-based format. Writing an XSLT stylesheet to convert it to any future format is fairly trivial, certainly within the capabilities of many readers of this News for Nerds site. (Look at how Calibre can translate EPUB on the fly when saving an ebook to e.g. a Kindle device). EPUB is no more destined to be unreadable in a few years than the future-proof ASCII books that Project Gutenberg has offered for decades now.

Rich person protectionism.

[Aquitaine]

I've heard similar suggestions made in New York to San Francisco to here in Austin, which AFIAK has the US's largest remaining independent bookstore.

Let's be honest, though. This isn't about buying books and it certainly isn't about literacy or encouraging reading. It is about the experience of having a culturally 'cool' place to go and drink coffee and browse and hang out.

This is one of the hypocrisies of the left: they want affordable housing for everyone right up until affordable housing means building tract homes in places that might damage the 'character' of their neighborhoods. This may well be the case, but I'm not aware of how to elevate thousands of people to middle class homeownership without having a place to put them, and if you are claiming to be an ally of the working class, you are putting them at arm's length through measures like these that preserve admittedly cool perks for the wealthy urban elite while making it more difficult for your average Jean to buy books because he's not only subsidizing the rich coffee shop yuppie, his discretionary income now only permits him X-n books.

I have a really hard time thinking poorly of Amazon for making books available to everyone at a really low cost. I do feel for the mom-and-pop bookstores, but from a socieital perspective that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. I run a business and if my business became obsolete because of something that had tremendous benefits for everybody, I'd adapt and find a new business. Ain't no guarantees in this world and statism is the tired old answer that always ends the same way.

Did the French learn nothing from 1845

[Shompol]

It has been 170 years since the famous petition to French Parliament to protect candle maker from unfair competition from a certain celestial body. Did they learn nothing? Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?

Maybe use that money to preserve some outstanding paper book editions? Or poll that money to create a free e-book repository to educate the masses who don't have the resources to pay for books $60 a pop? Today we have the technology to bring literacy and education FOR FREE to every ghetto and remote corner of the world, yet a certain Mikey Mouse character prefers and inifinite copyright, and universal as well (Thanks, WTO!)

Re:Did the French learn nothing from 1845

[sackvillian]

Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?

Because small bookstores are part of what makes Paris the most visited city in the world? (You don't think tourism is a failed industry, do you?) Because literature is a huge part of the cultural heritage of France and remains a national past-time? Because if Amazon is the only bookseller in the world in a decade or so, they will do what monopolies are known to do: screw over the authors, focus on mass-appeal crap, enforce DRM? (Just look at the music industry for examples of this, and imagine how bad it would be if it was even more centralized!)

I'm not French but one of the reasons I love France is because nearly every French citizen I've met would be able to produce these answers and talk intelligently about this bill. On Slashdot, and in North America, we seem to be collectively drunk on the free-market, short-term kool-aid.

Re:Will the French government be providing Amazon.

[0123456]

That's freaking brilliant. Now I can set up a multinational in the EU that does all its business outside the EU, and not have to pay any tax!

Re:Free Market Economics

[nurb432]

Why don't you go back to Russia where you belong, with the rest of your comrades? You don't belong, or deserve, to be here.

Re:Will the French government be providing Amazon.

[blackraven14250]

Yes, at least until the rest of the world follows suit.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[blackraven14250]

"Most liberalist" does not mean "most libertarian".

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[c-reus]

You are correct, partially. Only three specific models of PS3 support older PS2/PS1 titles. See https://support.us.playstation.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/232/session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xMzgyOTAzNzcyL3NpZC9RNjdVTVNEbA%3D%3D for reference. PS2 supports PS1 titles, although PS2 itself is not that easy to find these days.

Why not regulate the freight instead

[John.Banister]

If Amazon is winning on price by offering free shipping, why not, instead of price fixing books, make a law requiring anyone who ships a product to pass along the cost of the packaging and the exact amount they are charged by the shipping company. That would limit some of Amazon's advantage unless they invest heavily in France by building their own freight network there.

Except it doesnt work that way

[voss]

The mom and pop stores in the USA were killed 30 years ago by National and regional chain stores. Walmarts main competition is target, but also publix,amazon, dollar general,etc,etc. When you compete at all levels you have to compete with everyone including constant new arrivals like Aldi, Winco, etc.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[turbidostato]

"Amazon isn't dumping"

That's why I added an "if". But then, selling at a loss, as the article indicates, *is* dumping.

That's the simple answer

[rsilvergun]

but the problem is it's not the right answer. It's not about brick and motar, it's about there being only 1 company you buy everything from. That's Amazon's long term goal, and they're not shy about pointing it out. It's why they have so many investors even though their profit margin is so bad. The investors are expecting Amazon to drive the competition out, jack up the prices (and their profits) and then there'll be nothing anyone can do about it.

So when you say they should go out of business, that's only true if you completely ignore what the people of France (and people in general) desire and what's in their best interests. That's fine if you're the sort who believes in dog eat dog, winner take all capitalism. For the rest of us we support the regional players anyway.

To put it in terms that fit your world view: it's kinda like what Chairman Mao did with crops: He told everyone to double plant. A bad idea that sounds good on paper, has good gut feeling and 'truthiness'. Instead of double the food you had famine. It's the same thing with Amazon. It sounds good on paper to let the weaker players die out. And on a gut level it seems like the right thing to do. But it blows up in our faces. Instead of a cornucopia of cheap goods you'll be struggling to come up with the money for basic necessities.

Re:That's the simple answer

[profplump]

There are obviously downsides to having only one provider in any market (there are benefits as well) but that's not really the point. There are many ways to preserve competition without penalizing businesses who have a non-traditional sales model; intentionally discriminatory rules only serve to enforce the status quo, not to promote justice. And France has a long history of attempting to preserve their "culture" via exclusionary and discriminatory trade rules; the politically powerful people in France get to keep their culture and the rest of the world (including most people in France) get screwed.

Re:That's the simple answer

[Clsid]

Actually what Amazon is doing amounts to driving out the competition and there are several anti-dumping laws in place to deal with those issues. Just because it is a well known brand as opposed to some nameless Chinese factory does not make it right. Monopolies are not good.

Re:That's the simple answer

[Richy_T]

Except Chairman Mao had his "barrel of a gun" and Amazon has... one click shipping...

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Joining Yet Again]

Think of all the factories, technicians, cables, servers, routers, political agreements, &c. required to maintain an "information economy".

Now check when books were first published.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[Gryle]

What exactly counts as "serious" literature, praytell? Did God descend from on-high to tell you or some special cadre of literary scholars which books are acceptable and which are rot? I'm rather cool on Dan Brown and I'm frankly a bit scared to crack open Fifty Shades of Greybut I don't begrudge people wanting to read them. Simply not my tastes.
I also have a sneaking suspicion we keep re-reading the same "classic" writers mostly out of tradition, even though their art is really not that high. Shakespeare, for instance, draws much of his comedy from fart jokes, fat jokes, synonyms for "penis", and the sit-com circumstances so widely derided by TV critics. His histories are fairly politically-charged as well, suited to fit the tastes of the ruling regents at the time.

How do you think Amazon started? Selling books che

[raymorris]

They are using their accumulated wealth to start selling books at discount prices? How, pray tell, do you imagine Amazon got that wealth? They've been selling books at low prices since day one, that's their original business.

Death wish because you predict. Twisted human bein

[raymorris]

> Amazon will abuse its power once it has attained monopoly status as
a supplier.

So you predict that Amazon will have a monopoly , ignoring the fact it isn't possible (some customers prefer a bookstore, so they will always have customers).
You then predict that after Amazon achieves this impossible feat, they could abuse their position.
Based on those two predictions, you wish a horrible death on your fellow man.

You're a vile, twisted person aren't you.

Re: I see plenty of people reading

[CRCulver]

In the EU, copyright holds for 70 years from publication. That means the greater portion of 20th-century literature is still covered.

Re:In other news...

[AthanasiusKircher]

If niche (read: more intellectually rigorous) books are more affordable, this primarily benefits higher-educated, wealthier consumers. In practice, the French model asks the masses to subsidize the consumption habits of the educated rich.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to couple "educated" and "rich" here, except to make your argument appear stronger than it is. It's true that people with more education tend to earn more money. But the most educated people (and "most intellectually rigorous") often aren't "the rich." Most academics, for example, earn more than a blue-collar salary, but they don't earn anything like what a lawyer or medical doctor would earn, let alone a corporate executive or something.

And there are plenty of intelligent people who want to read intelligent books who aren't rich at all, or even upper middle class.

Years ago, many publishers actually DELIBERATELY did what you make sound like some sort of social injustice: they used profits from the stuff they sell the masses to fund the "quality" intellectual books they wanted to produce. Some publishers still do this -- many academic books are produced with slim profit margins or even losses, with print runs sometimes only in the hundreds even at major presses.

Personally, I think this is not only a noble thing to do (rather than just taking the money from the best-sellers and paying it to publishing executives), but it's also a net social benefit. Besides the importance of publishing quality research and things like that, making quality books affordable is important so that we can actually allow social mobility. If only the rich people can afford to be educated because quality books are expensive, then class divisions become even worse.

Far from an injustice, your argument highlights a practice that would actually have a social benefit if more widely practiced. Taking a few dollars from the profits of the latest celebrity biography or crappy genre fiction novel and using them to promote intellectually rigorous books and make them affordable is making an investment in the education for society as a whole.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[mark_reh]

So are you playing the "end of the world" scenario here, where civilization has collapsed and it's up to you to rebuild civilization from books, or are we talking about everyday issues? If you're talking about the former, well, OK. You've got me there. Paper books are best in such a scenario, but then you'll probably have things other than books to worry about- roving gangs of cannibals, for instance. If you're talking about the latter, then here you go:

1) I can read them without electricity or a reading device.
True, but the cost of electricity and a reading device is actually pretty small compared to the cost of moving large quantities of paper books every time you change domiciles. If you are a real collector, your domicile has to keep getting larger or your living space in it smaller to allow your collection to grow. That is another huge cost.
2) I can read them without requiring permission from a licensing agency.
That's a non issue for most books. It is easy to strip off DRM in most formats. If you read and post to a forum like this you are sufficiently knowledgeable to locate and apply the appropriate software. Many books are available without any DRM.
3) I can resell them.
If they don't cost anything in the first place there is no need to resell them. The stuff you can get for free and DRM-free would take multiple lifetimes to read. This includes most of the classic literature and poetry.
4) Most are still readable after decades or even centuries.
Electronic book formats are and will be convertible from one format to another easily. Project Gutenberg books, for example, are mostly in .txt format and have been readable for decades. There is no reason to think this won't continue. Sure, your reader will require periodic replacement, but we are all used to replacing our electronics every couple years as new technology renders the old obsolete by doing things like increasing battery life, adding functionality, improving speed, higher resolution screens, etc. The cost of replacing a book reader every few years is small compared to the real cost of maintaining a physical library of paper books.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[mark_reh]

How many cell phones have you had in the last 5 years and how many will you have in the next? Why is it so unproblematic to get a new phone but so difficult to change software or even hardware for reading ebooks? The last time I checked, ebook reading hardware cost a lot less than a new smart-phone. In fact, you can read ebooks on your smart-phone, though the experience is somewhat less than optimal.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[mark_reh]

I too packed, moved across country, and unpacked literally a ton of books (I am an engineer and dentist, my wife is an engineer and physician) multiple times over a 10 year period and finally decided to start getting rid of them a few moves ago. The books that remain are still in boxes having never been unpacked from 2 or 3 moves ago.

When I think of the energy I have wasted- not fuel, but personal muscle power- to move all those books all those times in all those years, to say nothing of the energy expended and discomfort suffered in carrying some of them back and forth to and from school for so many years, I could kick my mother for bearing me in an age before all books were available electronically.

Competition Involves Investment

[b4upoo]

Obviously funding is a huge part of success. We see the same issue with Wall Mart. Small book sellers need to be aware that if they can not achieve superior funding they certainly had best have some outstanding quality to gain customer support. Companies like Amazon self fund at a certain point and most small sellers can not do that. However it is not a monopoly when others are allowed to gather funds if they can and enter the market as a very well funded entity. France is a bit quirky in their thinking.

illegal...

[SuperDre]

What france is doing is illegal according to european laws/agreements. It's state funded bookstores (goverment buys the buildings and leases them for much lower prices as a commercial company can ask, also making a low to prevent free business is also illegal)..

French librarians and metadata

[Anarchix]

I am French and I have really enjoyed reading almost all comments. I am not a big advocate of free-market, but I agree that in theory it can optimize the distribution and reduce the cost of books in that case. However, at the same time I (and probably many French people) want to keep physical libraries that add some value (guidance, human touch, tourism, whatever...). To me these two things are partly contradictory. In short, I think that generalist libraries are not viable and that bigger enterprises could do the same job better in the end. Back to reality, I agree with many people who pointed out that Amazon was distorting the market. Free-market advocates here probably don't know that Amazon uses tons of tricks to pay less taxes for instance. That's why I agree with the decision of the MPs, we have to do what is necessary to keep our libraries afloat right now. Librarians are valuable and we can't just lose few generations of librarians because of a company trying to build a monopoly. ideally, librarians should specialize more and find a way to monetize their skill that is: metadata. French librarians have lost the battle of mass distribution, but the battle of metadata is not over yet and I think French librarians have right now quite an edge on Amazon (or any other mass supplier).

Re: I see plenty of people reading

[AmiMoJo]

It's 2013, so less than 57% of 20th century literature is covered.

Re:I see plenty of people reading

[GrumpySteen]

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years? I highly doubt that

The first ebook was made available in 1971. Here we are 42 years later and it's still available.

Your doubts are unfounded. Stop spreading FUD.

What about the other way?

[Shomra]

Setting prices is one way to do it, but they could also just offer the difference to the book dealers, i.e. subsidies. If you want the diversity, that's fine, but you don't _have_ to rig the marketplace to do that. It's also better because the benefit of diverse bookstores doesn't accrue only to the bookstore. Other local businesses benefit, so there's no reason not to share the burden through a tax/subsidy. You don't even have to make it governmental. You could just use a cooperative.

sounds to me like accessorizing your city

[drkoemans]

Which is great. Like adding a settee to your living room, except bookstores to your city. It sounds like they are doing it backwards though. If I am an amazon customer in France but not in Paris, I want the cheapest price for a book. Why should I subsidize the decorations of the Parisians? You want book stores, make it like Disneyland and just have government owned storefronts to sell books as a facade. It doesn't matter if they turn a profit or not, they are decorations.

Re:Race to bottom paid for the computer you typed

[bussdriver]

You have no free market capitalism; never did. Just as communism was never actually implemented, nether has free market capitalism. All implementations have been far from the ideals and their success is not ever entirely due to their ideology as the FAITHFUL proclaim.

Go get educated so you can constructively discuss issues instead of embarrassing yourself.

Re:Race to bottom paid for the computer you typed

[JoeyRox]

And the sky is not perfectly blue. I don't understand your point.

Re:Race to bottom paid for the computer you typed

[bussdriver]

There is no free market - it's so far from it that to use the term is bordering on being silly. I'm not complaining about 1-2% keeping it from a perfect 100% as you seem to think I am; illustrating the FAITH and ignorance of your perspective. It's far more like 50% making it unreasonable to classify as such.

Hell, the closest you have to an actually free market is the black market - which lacks any regulation or limitations other than having to stay underground - but then by definition it's created by the laws it breaks so within it's own definition it has total freedom.