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The Least They Could Do: Amazon Charges 1 Cent To Meet French Free Shipping Ban
Last year, we mentioned that the French government was unhappy with Amazon for offering better prices than the French competition, and strongly limited the amount by which retailers can discount books. Last month, the French parliament also passed a law banning free delivery of books. Ars Technica reports that Amazon has responded with a one-penny shipping rate on the orders that would previously have shipped free. Says the article:
This is by no means the first time France has tried to put a damper on major US tech companies dabbling in books or other reading materials. In 2011, the country updated an old law related to printed books that then allowed publishers to impose set e-book pricing on Apple and others. And in 2012, there was the very public dispute between French lawmakers and Google over the country's desire to see French media outlets paid for having their content pop up in search results. At least for now with this most recent situation, an online giant has found a relatively quick and easy way to regain the upperhand.
This is not at all about the French/US competition, the big French sites like fnac.com are subjected to the same rules of course.
You can think one thing or another about the rules, but they are about the big sites killing off the small local shops.
Amazon may say the shipping is free, but the truth is that the cost of shipping still exists. From an economics perspective, the burden of shipping costs is shared no matter who pays it.
Honestly, the only real figure of any importance is the total price. In summary, what a silly law.
The implication being that although shipping is not truly free, the cost of it is already fully covered by the order and will be paid for by the shipper.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because that is simply false. The cost of shipping is not simply a part of the cost of the product. It's the same product, regardless if you ship it to New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or anywhere else in the world. Yet the shipping costs are clearly different. So if you tried to account for the shipping costs as an integral part of the product, you'd be guilty of various crimes, like tax evasion due to accounting fraud, and also price discrimination against some of your customers. Besides, you'd also be guilty of dumping, which is a variant of antitrust violation. And that's just in the US, mind you.
if amazon and others giants really paid their taxes in the countries where they do business, this law does not exist.
So you are saying that Amazon has somehow found a way to actually ship items for free, to both the user and itself? Otherwise, whether they call it "free" or "covered" the cost of shipping is covered by the product purchase price.
At least for now with this most recent situation, an online giant has found a relatively quick and easy way to regain the upperhand.
Why the assumption that it is good for for-profit companies to find loopholes and avoid the will of democratically elected governments. The French government has made a decision that will have repercussions. If this is followed, books will be more expensive in France, but they wont lose the independent small bookstalls in town high streets that so many other countries will have. It may also inhibit the ability of online companies to start in France. But, guess what, the people can decide. They can lobby for it to be an election issue, ask their representatives which way they vote, etc. If they don't like the law they can get it changed.
Why is it assumed to be better for a private company with a board who the French people ave no influence upon circumvent this decision?
It's all very well offering things like this and obviously consumers love them. But ultimately when you are the size of Amazon and buy quantities on such a massive scale, you will suck the life out of niche competitors. What happens when all those competitiors are gone? You are left with one or two sources for every item and they can effectively charge whatever they like. Microsoft was seen as an unhealthy monopoly years back and this is no different.
No, I'm saying that the cost of shipping cannot be accounted for as an integral part of the product price, rather it must be accounted for separately. If it is nevertheless accounted for as part of the price, then Amazon would be doing a bunch of illegal things.
How so?
I mean building costs into pricing models has been around for quite a long time. Shipping is just one of those costs and costs come off the ledger for profit statements and tax purposes.
The US Postal Service has a flat rate box where if it fits, it ships anywhere for something like $15. If Amazon negotiates that to $10 and their average order qualifying for free shipping has 4 items in it, it is only $2.50 added onto the costs. So they take the retail price, discount it by 25% then add $3 to it and cover the costs of shipping without dipping too much into profits.
Businesses to this with taxes too. You place a fee or raise their rates and they just adjust their prices accordingly. It's easiest to do when the tax increase effects the entire industry too. Of course there has been some industries who got pissed and attached it as a separate fee specifically notating the law that caused the increase on the bill. Congress was really pissed when the telco industry started doing that.
I really don't see how making books more expensive than they need to be by adopting policies that support physical bookstores helps anybody. Shouldn't the goal be to make reading and culture as affordable as possible and meet the needs of buyers, instead of imposing particular delivery methods?
France is really TWO countries. Firstly there is the greater France and then there is Paris and its environs.
The equivalent would be to separate the greater US and what goes on inside the Beltway. The two are totally divorced from each other (and reality)
Many French People in rural France loathe the Parisiennes. When a car with a Paris Department number plate comes to my Village the locals suddenly become sullen and un-coopoerative towards the visitors. When the car leaves, life returns to normal. Even to a 'Les Rostbiff' like me they are far friendlier that they are to anyone from Paris.
I live most of the year in a village in the Haut-Savoie region, about 50Km from Geneva. We are just starting to see the holidaymakers from Paris arriving. Tomorrow marks the start of the French Summer holiday season as it is Bastille day.
Roll on Sept 1st and they all go home.
In France, books have a unique price but reseller can apply a 5% discount on the price if they want.
With this new law, shipping stays almost free but online bookstore are no more allowed to provide the 5% discount on books.
Pathetic country of small self-centered and narcissistic people.
That sounds a lot like another much bigger country.
Nonsense. By that argument, when you go into a shop and buy a shirt, you should pay for the shop assistant's time separately, and rental on the space you occupy in the shop separately, and fees for processing your credit card separately.
The limitation on price reduction has been in place for over 30 years. The price is fixed by the publisher and nobody is allowed to to sell at higher than 5% discount.
Now, online sellers who do not ship to a brick and mortar book store where you retrieve it are not allowed to have that discount, and they cannot offer free shipping either.
But it doesn't affect only Amazon, but all sellers, Amazon being the biggest.
The problem here is Amazon is not killing small or independent book stores with free shipping. The problem is independent small book stores are typically overpriced, have poor customer service from a minimum wage clerk who doesnt care to assist, and worse don't have what i want to buy. i love how retailers continue to have a big sook about unfair competition from online shopping, while totally ignorant of the fact they are not delivering what most customers want. and not just price. i find Amazon customer service is *better* than most brick and mortar retail stores.... I just watched a video via archive.org "Blockbuster Customer Service Training" and found Most of the "bad service" examples to demonstrate typical retail experience.
Only as a side note, the German speaking countries have also a system where books are not allowed to be sold below the price set by the publisher. Nothing new here.
that is all there is to it.
there is an old law, designed to protect the small against the big by blocking the price of books at no more than 5% bellow face value (books have a price printed on them).... this is to avoid dumping and other 'big store' practices....
it was found that offering free shipping on books (but not on other products) was a way to circumvent the law... so it was also judged illegal....
is it right or wrong... well, that is another question which is very culture sensitive...
cyrille
The man just can't tell the truth. Here he illegally promised free shipping with no intention of actually doing that then he charged for shipping. That is the way of their kind. They just can't stop lying. Bezos has done so many dishonest things lately that it looks like he is preparing to run for office as a Republican.
You should never try to protect at an overall cost an established business, however small, cute etc it is. Bookstores have to close. Not all of them, but a lot of them. The ones that actually provide value to the customer will stay due to people actually visiting them. For example I love Amazon, however there is one small local bookstore that provides a great personalized experience and does not gouge prices to which I go first. I see a lot of people not minding a surcharge when they get even more value out of the experience, so this bookstore will servive. Also that small bookstore has found things to bring that Amazon doesn't have etc. Protecting or bailing out failing businesses is always bad for the community as a whole in the long-run. Yes, poor buggy whip makers will be out of jobs in the short term, but we can't all be riding carriages into the future...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
> And they still force usage of their internationally-dead language on others
By 2050 French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/want-to-know-the-language-of-the-future-the-data-suggests-it-could-be-french/
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t16740.htm
Many French People in rural France loathe the Parisiennes. When a car with a Paris Department number plate comes to my Village the locals suddenly become sullen and un-coopoerative towards the visitors. When the car leaves, life returns to normal. Even to a 'Les Rostbiff' like me they are far friendlier that they are to anyone from Paris.
The same is true in reverse too. I picked up quite a thick rural Normandy accent[1] when I speak French and discovered that everyone in Paris is a lot more polite to me if I speak French with an English accent...
[1] Cultural equivalents: For brits, think Devonshire farmer, for americans think deep south.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Had some exchange students from France once. One of them was always apologizing for the other being a jerk: "He's from Paris."
Stay out of the big cities and France is a wonderful place.
living in france there is one major part of the info missing in this short description, free shipping is only banned if you also offer a discount from the recomended price.
this may seem odd but a price tag of say 10€on a book minus the 10% discount and free shipping can cause smaller/local shops to not be able to keep up as they have higher fees tied to renting and maning the bookstore (per book sold).
also the fench goverment is always puting forwards the "french exeption" where taxes from booksales and TV licensing goes towards creating content (music, film and literature) despite there being a massive overhaul on comic creating and the way they pay taxes at the moment (causing many french comic artists to currenty fear for the future of ther art). so this may seem trivial but is far from it.
No, I'm saying that the cost of shipping cannot be accounted for as an integral part of the product price, rather it must be accounted for separately. If it is nevertheless accounted for as part of the price, then Amazon would be doing a bunch of illegal things.
How you charge for it and how you account for the cost of shipping are two separate items. As long as the accounting makes clear that it is an expense related to sales volume and thus scales with sales I think you have accounted for that expense in a proper manner. You can price a product so that shipping costs are included, even if the exact cost may be more or less for that particular item; the goal is to ensure the variations even out so you maintain desired margins. It's no different than the shopkeeper or tradesman who quotes you a price and then delivers goods to your location. I fail to see what is illegal about it, unless a specific law prevents that in your location.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Small shops exist because of many reasons.
One important reason is that the consumer does not know 'the cheapest price' and where to source it from.
The next is the shipping hassle. Then shopping online hassle. Amazon makes it easy.
Unless it is a I must have it now item, or lazy consumer thinks a couple of dollars or more not worth chasing in the moment of now.
Books and paperbacks fit the fast moving consumer smalls. the postage 'hurdle' could tip all small shops down the drain.
Long term, regulation like this will just stall the decay. At least out of UK book postage is reasonable - oddly enough hurting France too. Pharmaceuticals and supplements are the last to face the 'one global price' adjustment.
If they could not imagine this really simple countermeasure, they cannot have even a tiny bit of effective intelligence. Makes on wonder about the quality of all these other laws and not only in France.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Marketing: because "free" and "new" are the two strongest advertising buzz words that drive sales. It doesn't matter that it truly isn't free, rather buried in the cost of the item, consumers are attracted to products that include "free" or "new" somewhere and are more likely to buy.
This is also why "new version" or "new features" or "new colors" or "new enhnacements" are often pitched despite the product being the same old thing with the same old functionality with the same old annoyances.
The shop assistant is an employee of the shop. Amazon has not incorporated their own shipping company.
What is with Amazon lately? I just got free shipping on an order less than $3 Canadian. How does that many any sense?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The idea was to prevent supermarkets and larger booksellers from competing on price and driving smaller shops out of business.
Which is in effect a subsidy to small inefficient book shops paid for by customers. It's a bit of a mystery here how the end customer is benefiting from this. I enjoy small local book shops as much as anyone here but in the cold light of day they are businesses just like Amazon and if they aren't providing enough extra value to customers to attract their business then they should go out of business just like any other inefficient business. A bookstore is a middleman between the author and the reader and the product they are selling is a commodity. If the experience of going to a physical bookstore isn't sufficient for me to be willing to pay extra for it then I don't see why I should have to pay higher prices for something I don't need or want.
With apologies to Tony Stark I have been described as many things but sentimental is not among them. Sometimes the old way of doing things is not worth saving.
It is sunday, serious writers are resting and this leaves room for the second class morons. A law is passed to save small and medium businesses which pay taxes here and "the French are attacking our precious big US corporations". Those which avoid any tax thank to double dutch sandwich and so ones.
How do you know the shop assistant is an employee? Maybe they contract them in from a body shop? It's none of your business where they get their labour from.
Yes, competition is good for the consumer, which is why France wants to protect competition in the marketplace
Price floors do not protect competition. They prevent competition. Price floors are a subsidy to inefficient businesses. They make it impossible to compete on price and do so at the expense of the end consumer. Price supports subsidize unnecessary and inefficient middlemen.
Now as to the price of books, maybe you don't know but french books cost on average less than american ones.
Citation needed.
And considering the US is a much larger market, a free market WHAT does that really tell you ?
It tells me nothing because even if what you claim is true (and you haven't proven that) there is insufficient information to draw conclusions regarding why that might be the case. Could be subsidies, could be exchange rates (the Euro is strong relative to the dollar and a lot of books are published in the US which would make them cheaper in Europe), could be some other structural advantage. No conclusions can be drawn without more information.
The French have a vibrant cultural market.
And yet we see the French constantly having to pass laws to "protect" their culture from the outside. I see McDonalds opening in France but I don't exactly see French bistros dotting the countryside of the US. The French should be justifiably proud of their culture and what it produces but sometimes they forget that sometimes people should decide for themselves what they want their culture to be.
Especially when it comes to books. They love books, they love reading, and they buy a lot of books. Much more on average than americans.
Again, citation needed but their supposed love of books has little to do with whether price supports should be used to subsidize small, inefficient bookstores. If French customers like the experience of browsing in such stores and are willing to pay more for the experience then such stores should have little difficulty surviving because they are not competing on price. But if they ARE competing on price then all this law does is subsidize a business that customers really aren't willing to pay for. Either way price floors are not a good idea.
Imagine a future were only Amazon or Apple can distribute/sell books. It would be a nightmare.
It is also a strawman argument. That is deeply unlikely to ever come to pass. The market will certainly change but change doesn't have to be bad. Right now you have a smallish number of large publishers who control the sale and price of most books. Amazon and others are taking the power and profits from the publishers but as an end consumer I'm simply trading one large oligopoly for another. What we really want is some way for readers to buy directly from authors without any middleman and in theory the internet provides a way to completely circumvent Amazon and publishers altogether when they don't provide extra value.
Whereas even small towns in France are packed with bookshops.
Of course they are. They are being subsidized by price floors. They don't have to compete on price or provide a better experience that people are willing to pay for. Price floors subsidize middlemen who otherwise would have no reason or ability to exist. If these bookstores are competing on price then consumers are getting screwed by paying more than they should. If the small bookstores are providing an experience beyond the book that people are willing to pay for then the price supports are unnecessary because they are not competing on price. Either way the price supports are a bad idea that only takes money out of the pockets of customers and gives it to businesses that arguably don't deserve it.
The real problem here is not Amazon or books or even Google, it's the French mindset that things should never change,
Fetishing bookshops doesn't have any emotional appeal to me - they're just buildings stacked with a small and limited selection of reading materials, which inefficiently deploy land and people. Given the rise of the e-book even large chain bookshops will likely disappear over the coming decades, and who will cry for them?
The geek as cultural imperialist.
What has no value for me has no value for you.
The French have all kinds of worthwhile ideas on larger matters. This occurred to me recently when I was strolling through my museum-like neighborhood in central Paris, and realized there were --- I kid you not --- seven bookstores within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. Granted, I live in a bookish area. But still: Do the French know something about the book business that we Americans don't?
For a few bucks off and the pleasure of shopping from bed, have we handed over a precious natural resource --- our nation's books --- to an ambitious billionaire with an engineering degree?
France, meanwhile, has just unanimously passed a so-called anti-Amazon law, which says online sellers can't offer free shipping on discounted books. The new measure is part of France's effort to promote "biblio-diversity" and help independent bookstores compete. Here, there's no big bookseller with the power to suddenly turn off the spigot. People in the industry estimate that Amazon has a 10 or 12 percent share of new book sales in France. Amazon reportedly handles 70 percent of the country's online book sales, but just 18 percent of books are sold online.
The French secret is deeply un-American: fixed book prices.
Fixing book prices may sound shocking to Americans, but it's common around the world, for the same reason. In Germany, retailers aren't allowed to discount most books at all. Six of the world's 10 biggest book-selling countries --- Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Spain and South Korea --- have versions of fixed book prices.
What underlies France's book laws isn't just an economic position --- it's also a worldview. Quite simply, the French treat books as special. Some 70 percent of French people said they read at least one book last year; the average among French readers was 15 books. Readers say they trust books far more than any other medium, including newspapers and TV. The French government classifies books as an "essential good," along with electricity, bread and water. A French friend of mine runs a charity, Libraries Without Borders, which brings books to survivors of natural disasters.
The French aren't being pretentious or fetishizing bookstores. They're giving voice to something we know in America, too. "When your computer dies, you throw it away," says Mr. Montagne of the publishers' association. "But you'll remember a book 20 years later. You've deeply entered into a story that's not your own. It's forged who you are. You'll only see later how much it has affected you. You don't keep all books, but it's not a market like others. The contents of a bookcase can define who you are."
The French Do Buy Books. Real Books.
People in France work fewer hours than their US counterparts. France has mandated a 35 hour work week for their full time employees. The US averages 42 hours for full time work (will probably go down after Obamacare is implemented) and often full time salaried employees have an average of 45-55 hours a week. France also requires a minimum of 5 weeks vacation.
Gee, I wonder why their products are more expensive than the US...
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
In the world of the internet, no matter how many rules or laws you pass, only one player will ever be able to compete on price. Even if you banned online sales altogether, someone could find the cheapest physical store (the only difference is that then it would be limited by location/distance, allowing a few more players...but thats as far as you can go).
If I want a specific product, I know what I want precisely, then of course the only thing that matters is how cheap and how fast i can get it, and there's always one objective number here. There's a small variation if you include customer service of course...but in this case as you mentionned, amazon has almost flawless customer service.
Anyone who wants to compete has to do so with value. Anyone who goes in a brick and mortar store either wants instant gratification (but that will go away as "same day shipping" becomes more common), or _doesn't know what they want._
The later is where brick and mortar stores have to compete to provide value. If the staff doesn't know what they're talking about and can't assist, you automatically are worse off than the cheapest retailer that can be found online and will die (Bestbuy!!!).
I used to work for an online retailer/manufacturer of marketing products that is top dog as far as price/quality goes. No one could compete in the US on price and delivery. But in certain markets, we couldn't get any kind of traction... why? The brick and mortar stores had very very knowledgeable/well trained people, and provided fantastic value to customers, so they never went online, as the savings weren't worth it.
We don't have pennies in Europe. Just eurocents.
-- Cheers!
In the US if you use a bar or cafe or reasturant you ARE expected to pay the waiting staff separately from the cost of the product you purchase (Tip). In many other countries a tip is for good service (above and beyond). Not part of the staff wages.
Everything you said is correct. The one thing you aren't accounting for is that the end consumer is better off when they are employed than they are when they are out of work. Hence the attempts at protectionism. Oh, they may try to pretty it up by calling it protection of culture or some other crap. But it is just a form of trying to keep people employed. Such attempts are sometimes misguided - but they are trying to do something to prevent even more unemployment as massive unemployment is bad for people and bad for the economy.
On top of that for some dumb reason they put SF and Fantasy into one category 'SF&Fantasy' however I'm not interested in the later
At the soft end of speculative fiction's Mohs scale, what difference do you see between "SF" and "fantasy"? What's the difference between "ETs" and "elves"?
and it takes 5 or more years till an interesting title is finally translated into german.
Your complaint could be worded that most works of SF literature that you find "interesting" are not published under a license that allows fans to translate it. Whose fault is that?
Dumping aka means illegal state aid like china solar panels.
I get the marketing speak, but if the french government has a problem with free shipping, then certainly they can just call it something else that works out to the exact same thing for the consumer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The easy answer:
ETs: technology, future
Elves: magic, middle ages
The other topic about translation, that is easy to answer: american copyright law is at fault. As it prohibits authors to sell their work as they please. Once sold to a publisher the publisher has 'the copyright' ... I fail to see what your two points add to the discussion :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
if the things around people keep getting cheaper then it doesn't matter
Land is unlikely to "keep getting cheaper" over time.
technology [...] magic
Book sellers that group science fiction with fantasy follow Arthur C. Clarke's observation: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Larry Niven pointed out the converse about sufficiently analyzed magic. I'd be interested in how you would rigorously separate these.
future [...] middle ages
I understand what you're getting at: you're trying to avoid works of speculative fiction that take place in a so-called standard fantasy setting. But otherwise, it sounds like you're trying to distinguish "past" from "future". This is complicated by settings that are nominally soft science fiction but do not cross over with real-life history in such a way as to anchor dates. These include BSG ("All this has happened before, and all this will happen again" more than 150,000 years ago) and Star Wars ("A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."). What opinion do you have about speculative fiction settings closer to the present day, such as "steampunk" (recent past) and "urban fantasy" (present)?
The other topic about translation, that is easy to answer: american copyright law is at fault. As it prohibits authors to sell their work as they please. Once sold to a publisher the publisher has 'the copyright'
What compels an author to sell permanent exclusive rights, whether through assignment or exclusive license, to a publisher?
I fail to see what your two points add to the discussion :)
First, I was clarifying that the convergence of science fiction with fantasy is not the fault of book sellers but instead the result of a fundamental continuum between the two. Second, I was clarifying that unavailable translations are not the fault of book sellers, be they Amazon or brick and mortar, but instead business decisions made by authors.
Sorry, book sellers group it like this since, how long? Since Harry Potter? ... so no point to linger in a book store and browse the wall of books. For everyone 50% of the books are the wrong ones ...
Because they believe a Nerd who likes Fantasy also likes SF or a Geek who likes SF also likes fantasy.
Fact is, most people only read one of the genres
What compels an author to sell permanent exclusive rights, whether through assignment or exclusive license, to a publisher?
I don't know, I assume the 'free market' prevents him from getting a deal with any publisher at all, if he does not agree to slavery terms?
Second, I was clarifying that unavailable translations are not the fault of book sellers, be they Amazon or brick and mortar, but instead business decisions made by authors. ... so we don't translate it. The fourth we will do again because it was a best seller in the USA. Oooooops, those four books where a sequel and book number three is missing, sucks ... ... and as we are at it, learn more languages ...
no one said it was the 'book sellers'. tNevertheless your conclusion is nonsense. The author is the last one having anything to say, first comes the publisher in the original country, the 'guy' who has the copyright. THEN comes the publisher in the destination country. And those often decide 'oh, we translated the first and the second of the books of Mr. Author' but his third one did not get a Nebula or a Hugo
Hence: read in the original language
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
what difference do you see between "SF" and "fantasy"?
Fantasy is where the power is from some mystics who meditate on it and are part of some hokey religion. SF is where the power is Midichlorians or nanites or DNA. The settings and stories are the same.
Learn to love Alaska
To sell in France and be in a lawful manner versus tax (VAT) then you gotta have a presence in France, or you will get your goods get a frontier tax. There is no way around it. If it was that easy to do you really think there would be an amazon presence in france ? All they could simply do is a translated amazon.comn and have no rpesence in france and ship. But they don't. And VAT and import tax are the reason.
"You should never try to protect at an overall cost an established business, however small, cute etc it is" which would soon lead to monopoly. How is that monopoly of TW or other ISP in many US zone working for you ? Ultra free market capitalism lead to monopoly and loss of competition [b] and loss of competition is never good for consummer[/b]. Sometimes a bit of law which is anti free market, lead to an enhanced competition, even if it protect some small producer or big producer. That is a principle which most western european country have recognized : moderated capitalism is far better than outright all the way communism, or outright all the way free market capitalism. I wish the US would make some baby step toward that rather than hold onto that concept as if it was the golden fleece.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sorry, book sellers group it like this since, how long? Since Harry Potter?
Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) had The Lord of the Rings in its "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section in late 1993. This was three and a half years before first publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
I don't know, I assume the 'free market' prevents him from getting a deal with any publisher at all, if he does not agree to slavery terms?
An author could always be his own publisher, hiring an editor and having books printed through a contract printer. Or he could sign a time-limited contract with a publisher and have copyrights revert to him after a decade. Or he could license the rights to a publisher throughout the industrialized Anglosphere (US, CA, GB, IE, AU, NZ, ZA) but retain rights in the rest of the world, as the Authors Guild suggests. Or an author could sign with Baen, a publisher that not only specializes in speculative fiction but also "gets it" with respect to e-books. Baen offers e-books with no digital restrictions management, releases many of its authors' older works as free samples in the Baen Free Library, and even offers paid early access to the public.
Fantasy is where the power is from some mystics who meditate on it and are part of some hokey religion. SF is where the power is Midichlorians or nanites or DNA.
So would you agree with Larry Niven's assertion that "sufficiently analyzed magic" becomes indistinguishable from science? If so, then the only difference between science fiction and fantasy is how in control of their magic the magicians are. By your definition, electricity used to be "magic" centuries ago when Luigi Galvani and friends were doing experiments in "animal magnetism", and inheritance was "magic" before Gregor Mendel's pea experiments, and Dungeons & Dragons magic is "science" in the "Tippyverse" stories where spells are "trapped" in push-button devices that people use daily and people commute from city to city through teleporters.
The settings and stories are the same.
Bingo. What science fiction and fantasy have in common is exploration of how a particular counterfactual phenomenon affects relationship among sapient beings.
Anyone who goes in a brick and mortar store either wants instant gratification (but that will go away as "same day shipping" becomes more common), or _doesn't know what they want._
C) Wants to pay with cash. This is common among children too young to have a bank account in their own names.
D) Is buying an item that's too heavy to ship affordably with UPS or USPS and already owns a truck to carry it home.
"You should never try to protect at an overall cost an established business, however small, cute etc it is" which would soon lead to monopoly.
I don't think not protecting a failing business means to not have anti-trust laws to not allow monopolies destroy viable businesses. And, seriously, you think that the US broadband problem is due to open market? It is exactly the opposite, it is again protectionism when the cable companies manage to pass laws to prevent municipalities from competing with them, or even alternative technologies (e.g. see aereo) etc. The cable industry in the US is protected, if there was an open market the cable companies would actually have to invest in upgrades to keep up with the competition like in other countries where there is no "cable lobby".
http://www.amazon.com/First-Al...
356 pounds. Free shipping with amazon prime. Shipping is rarely an issue aside for niche stuff, even outside of Amazon. Kids can use prepaid cards. Sure, these may not be convenient enough in certain situations today...but tomorrow it may be another story.
Upper hand.
Upperhand != valid word.
Moronic, really.
SF & Fantasy have been tied together for as long as I can remember, predating Harry Potter by decades.
And people mix the genres up, because they'll read The Lord of the Rings, and then read Asimov or Clarke.
Personally, I don't care for dragons or elves or mystics or magic (so no, I don't do LotR or Hobbit or whatever), but a lot of what I read that fits in the "SF" side is speculative enough to be fantasy. (Would Starship Troopers be SF or Fantasy... or both?). In fact, they're generally combined because people just cannot agree on a sufficiently precise definition of SF - you have hard-SF geeks who think anything that is not possible with today's technology IS fantasy, etc.
So rather than debate the issue to death, retailers just realize that it's a hopeless distinction because there's no line that cleanly delineates the two. You have SF that takes place in the past, in the future, in present times. I'm sure you have fantasy that takes place in the past, in the future, and present times as well. Technology and Magic, well, is a Star Trek replicator any more magic than a wizard conjuring up a feast? They both have food magically appear In the end. Or teleportation via a spell or a teleporter?
Hell, there used to be a really nice bookstore up the street from my workplace, and they had a gigantic SF/Fantasy section (took up a whole wall of the store). Its SF/Fantasy section was larger than the mega-bookstore a couple of blocks away (3 floors of books, and a huge SF/Fantasy section too).
I really feel for small local shops, because I love wandering around bookstores and smelling the books and feeling them in my hand and thumbing through them, etc. But when I look at the price tag and a used book is $15 while a new copy of the same book is $4.50 on Amazon, it's pretty damn hard to convince myself to pay over triple just to have it two days sooner.
Well, for me it is pretty simple to define a dozen categories for SF and Fantasy.
In my eyes retailers simply became lazy, another reason why eBooks are on the rise, or online stores.
Via a computer it is much easier to find what you are interested in, despite the fact that it has the 'wrong' category.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
In fact, I don't know all the books I'd enjoy. I have favorite authors, but when you get past the first half dozen or so I'm probably missing authors just as good. If I just go by what I want, I'm going to miss out on some very good books.
In a bookstore, I can pick up books on a whim and look through them. I can look through various categories of books. It's easier to do this in the bookstore than it is in the browser.
If I wasn't buying eBooks primarily (for the simple reason that they do not take up space on my overstuffed bookshelves), I'd be hitting the bookstores for most of what I want to read.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> Many French People in rural France loathe the Parisiennes.
I fail to see why they only dislike women from Paris? Oh and btw that's Haute-Savoie, didn't you learn anything in school?