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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Typical

[puddingebola]

Just like the French to try and protect literature.

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

[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

[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.

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?

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: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...

[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

[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: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?

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

[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 love to read

[Zironic]

Have you heard about this newfangled institution called a library?

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: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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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".

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

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: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.

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.