Book prices are regulated in France [0] and you can’t just discount willy-nilly, in particular new book publications have selling prices set by the publisher.
This proposition is coming on top of that: it will block sellers from artificially discounting books by subsidizing shipping cost. It is basically closing a loophole that still allowed Amazon to have lower prices than others.
It doesn’t matter if you’re independent, purely online or not. The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now.
It may push people to buy local, but it’s only a side effect, and not the directly intended goal (there are other french online retailers that will benefit a lot more from this law).
[0] https://www.sne.fr/app/uploads/2017/11/Intervention-Catherin...
So in the end the seller with the best service will win.
The one thing they're really lacking is a good distribution system. Trying to order a book they don't have in stock, especially foreign ones, can often result in multi week delivery times or even a flat-out "no" which is insane to me since I'm from Germany and there we've had next day delivery to any shop in the country since the mid 90s at least.
So this should help level the playing field and make it worthwhile for the book shops to compete in delivery times, because if I understand this correctly I would NOT have to pay delivery if I go to pick up a book in the store?
On a personal level, delivery network was a big one, and Amazon wasn't the best on this as you can't choose in most cases (delivery guys randomly calling on my phone because they got lost in another town...). But everyone will have their pet peeve, some people will just chose on how warm they feel about the company.
So you are basically not allowed to pass the savings to your customers if you manage to innovate with your supply chain... That's interesting.
I don't have an opinion on how freshly published best-sellers should be sold, to me it's the same as new movies going into theaters...I personally don't care and will wait for the home/digital version. It's not like it will rot in place.
Amazon can still lower price on old books if they really want to. All in all it's about dirty plays between (big) dirty players, and regulators are mostly running around closing loopholes.
Amazon's low costs is only possible because they externalize their costs to society.
Local book stores being the same price, or even cheaper, isn't likely to influence my initial tendency to preview on the Web first, and if I search for my book and preview on the Web, I'm much more likely to buy it there too.
IMHO, France is only forestalling the inevitable, and eventually local book shops value won't be in selling books, but in providing a hangout place to discuss things, to have book tour speakers in person, to serve hipster coffee and snacks, etc. But as a pure book retail warehouse? I think think this is dead in the long term.
In these cases, Amazon acts as a real marketplace where a seller just gets a storefront to access their customers: shipping will often be done manually, the customer paying the real cost etc.
As an Amazon user, I really like that arrangement, where Amazon does what it is best at (cart handling), and small independent players get to reach a wide audience.
BTW this law has almost nothing to do with that, it will mainly affect best sellers from big publishers that set regulated prices (legal max discount is 5%, under conditions). Up until now online shop were flying under the radar as it seems, but regulator are catching up.
Well that last one will only happen in France, after this. In the US you go to Amazon for the free postage. And since so many people go to Amazon for the free postage, they can somehow charge a higher price without postage than indie booksellers including postage. It's a brand premium, not a convenience or cost premium. Too many people have the habit of checking Amazon first.
Now the world is my oyster.
But people are desperate to save the local Waterstones that stocks nothing but sports biographies and celeb cooking books...
You seem to forget about the public that wants (demands) a book retail warehouse. The median shopper does not exhaust the market.
But do they demand a brick and mortar physical book retail warehouse that they have to commute to? I mean if I were to say "Gamers demand a brick-and-mortar retail 'app store' like Gamestop" you'd think it was absurd. Of course people want to just download games from app stores and not have to physically go to a store to get games.
The vast majority of the public doesn't go to libraries and doesn't want a big box bookstore. It's why Borders and Barnes-n-Nobles failed. In most of the bookstores I've been to, their value has been communal, as a place to hang out, chill with your laptop, study for school, or meet authors or speakers, but they've never been about the need to shop, because inherently their selection is inferior and their convenience low.
Big stores like the Fnac could offer the same shipping prices as Amazon (and maybe they're already doing it).
Publishers don't care much who is selling the book as long as it's selling.
Obviously this only applies to physical books. Ebooks only account for about 15% of books sold in France unlike the US where it's close to 50% [1].
Amazon is using its money to basically price dump books, forcing competitors to the same path if they want to stand a chance. Having the other players also get into dumping is not a desirable outcome.
Who is Amazon harming in the books industry other than small retailers?
Looks like it's protecting everyone except the book buying consumer.
I’ve long thought that the publishers have has their whole business model wrong in quite a few ways.
When you follow a subject beyond a surface/casual level of understanding there is very little you just 'discover' at a bookstore, unless it's one of a few specialty shops. You follow journals, publishers' catalogs, and forums which not only keep you current with new releases, but also expose you to back-catalog and out of print material. And nobody beats Amazon for carrying all of that material.
Probably a lack of your own imagination. There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon.
I think that's what happaned with a similar law in Israel. These bad effects were predicted a head of adopting the law in Israel and then actually materialized. Finally this law of price control was drop altogether due to these adversarial effects.
It's not wrong. There are other things that are important aside from customer purchasing power.
Amazon is using its economies of scale to drive out smaller businesses. It is not unique in that. But the industries that Amazon affects may be unique to the nations that wish to preserve them.
Most centralization incrementally kills local industry, including the local culture industry. TV, railroads, chain stores, Wal-mart, you name it -- they are all killing something local.
That is, in the US the vision is generally something along the lines of Amazon vs. small independent stores a la "You've Got Mail".
In France, there are big, multi-day book fairs that take up large swaths of major cities. I visited Lyon during the Quais du Polar festival years ago, which is a 3 or 4 day event focused just on the crime fiction genre. I've never experienced anything like that in the US.
It’s too bad, book festivals can be a lot of fun. I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2019 and the estimate was 400k people over the 5 days. High school kids were even taking class field trips to hear author talks. It was really nice to see so many people excited for books.
In modern times, this is an incidental cost of access.
There's also some understandable doubts about the long term results of this tradeoff, as it is suspected that the final stage of this play is to raise prices again, thereby squeezing access up to some "optimal" equilibrium.
Are more people actually brought into the fold?
The rise of Amazon seems to correlate with fewer people also needing libraries and that libraries store fewer books.
The problem is that the prerequisite for using Amazon and libraries with fewer books is the wealth to fund a networked computer and the knowledge how to use it.
As someone from a blue collar background whose education utilized the dead trees of the local libraries quite extensively, I'm not at all sure that this wouldn't be an obstacle if I had to go through education today. That is concerning to me.
Even as someone highly trained in tech, I find that when I need knowledge from before about 1995, that knowledge has become increasingly difficult to access. The knowledge likely isn't online, and so many of the books have been destroyed that browsing the stacks is quite often unsuccessful nowadays.
Walmart has increased the standard of living of the lower class quit considerably.
In the 1980's everything was kind of expensive. From 1990-2010 with the rise of real globalisation it was just unbelievable what could be had for a a few dollars.
I think most people would notice it if Walmart were to suddenly disappear.
That said, anything cultural is probably worth preserving, usually we don't price in those things well enough.
Also, 'quality' and other intangibles don't fare well into the equation.
So it's a matter of being really smart with the regulation, and hopefully sorting out the tax regimes as well so as to not allow the 'Ireland Tax Haven' scenarios.
I don’t see this as necessarily a good thing. People buying a bunch of low quality products that are designed to be as cheap as possible and then just tossing them in the trash when they inevitably break is terrible for the environment.
Japan produced crap. They got better.
China is in the same boat now.
And it makes the world more fragile and less diverse and interesting. Capitalism is founded on the idea of many producers competing for many customers.
Amazon model steps as middleman so producers have only one buyer, and consumers have only one seller. That gives them a lot of power to control prices, and what is produced or consumed.
Monopsony and monopoly all in one.
For international HN'ers, a question: is the boardgame "Monopoly" popular in your country? Here in the US it's an old classic.
Although I agree with this, but I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing for the customers. Some industries are best centralized and some are not. For the business of selling books I think it's best to have a lot of sellers.
> There are other things that are important aside from customer purchasing power.
Would you be able to elaborate on this or was it hyperbole? Personal experience is where there is passenger rail service are inherently more interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/Americans-Democratic-Experience-Danie...
There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.
The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.
Cars are post-railroad. It can be true that car-centric places are less interesting, while it is also true that the railroad killed local culture.
This is probably true, but also probably inevitable. As the world shrinks we lose local flavor but gain a more commonly held homogeneous culture. I'm not sure that this is new, just faster than it was before.
Another way of phrasing that: France’s local book sellers are so bad at serving their customers that an American company that’s existed less than 30 years can totally undercut them, despite the local sellers’ massive advantage in understanding their local communities and culture.
I don’t know why folks are so willing to jump to protect small businesses that don’t do a good job. Local is fundamentally a good place to be. Local is an advantage. (Amazon knows this; see how they’re using Whole Foods to create a local presence and _improve_ their service). Large businesses got to be large because they were better at serving their customers than the small businesses.
My personal experience is that the small businesses are just worse at providing consistent, friendly, high quality service. They are rewarded by the market accordingly.
Government protection for heritage is maybe ok, but protecting lazy, self-entitled business owners from competitive market forces is not. If there’s really a problem with shipping costs that they desperately need to fix, they can just make postage cheaper for books, similar to the USPS media mail program.
Setting aside the fact that we've had two years of covid with months of curfew and lockdown that has absolutely murdered bookstores (but not Amazon), the real reason is simple: Amazon has a massive delivery network and allows for browsing online. Why do they? Because they have the money and the time to keep their stocks updated, and the scale to send out full trucks of packages to subsidise the delivery. Why don't small bookstores do ? Because they're single/dual employee places that do not have the time to keep a website updated, and cannot afford to send out a bike for delivery of a 10€ book.
This is not Amazon being "better". This is Amazon being naturally advantaged by being massive. There's no being rewarded by the market, simply being crushed by the billions of dollars of your competitor.
And if we're going to speak of laziness, Amazon is certainly a lazier company than any of the book stores I've been to.
Physical bookstores have their own charm and it would be a shame to lose them just because it's cheaper and more convenient to order online.
It seems obvious but nobody ever calls that behavior what it is, along with "cultural protection" which is really an attempt to treat the choices of others like your own property in what would be called overwhelming arrogance in most other contexts.
Centralization is also densification, which has merits backed by scientific research. It's, in theory, better for everyone - well, for everyone else.
Doesn't it increase overall happiness?
Who's judging the quality, if not the consumers?
If people loved French content they'd buy it in droves from Amazon anyway. If they don't... why not?
You wouldn’t want to live in a world like that, but you also aren’t likely to fight it yourself and even if you tried you probably wouldn’t succeed.
It’s basically why we have any sort of regulation.
The reason of the downfall of our civilization is because of that specific problem, you think about everything as a business, including countries
Unless you own a French book store, the fettering of capitalism is making you poorer.
I started a Biden collection, but only one book so far. Things that make you go hmmmm....
It will not prevent customers to stop shopping online, so no effect for legacy bookstore.s
Like most goverment proposed solutions: This will actually create a new problem not fix the origintal intented cause.
Dematerialized everything has its problems too
But why bother with the social aspect of things, we are all enslaved consumerist robots anyways..
The point is not on online vs brick and mortar, it’s to prevent Amazon from providing a lower price by eating shipping costs. Keep in mind they can’t reduce the book cost when it’s new (it’s a French law), so shipping price was their only lever.
It only made it harder for smaller startups or other companies to compete. Meanwhile Bigh Tech, suported by expensive legal, Design and marketing teams evated all new the regulatory burden.
Overall GDPR only made Google and Facebok more powerful, and introduced a new legal barrier to challenger startups. Hence helps to consolidate even more their power.
And Finally to make it even worse now everyone has to deal with that stupid consent cookie banner in every single website..
Do you have any data to back that claim up?
If Amazon has to start charging for shipping, they will be charging the same as every other bookstore in total, making them just another option among the others. Some will still prefer Amazon, but there is no downside anymore to chose another online shop (and there’s plenty big and reputable ones).
Not quite. Amazon will make more profit than it does by removing the shipping subsidy. Then, given their preexisting market position and logistics/delivery network, it's still likely to be faster to get a book from Amazon if a local store doesn't have a copy. If you don't have to have the book right now and are already a regular Amazon shopper, Amazon still has a significant advantage.
Amazon is never going to be just another purchase option. That requires them to only compete on price. They have plenty of other advantages, and a legal mandate to increase their profit margin on book sales might shift book buyer's shopping habits a tiny bit, but it's not stopping the trend, and I doubt it's slowing things much either.
Similar to what fb is dealing with. They would welcome any legislation to hamper social media competition since they could then stop buying up potential threats.
Most of their paperbacks are printed on demand. Kinda cool and pretty good for the environment IMO. Never a book being printed that's not needed. But smaller stores can't compete with that.
Another option would have been to support local bookstores by subsidizing transportation, which would have allowed them to lower the price to the point of being competitive with Amazon.
But I guess that using public money to help local businesses is not as good as getting the customers to pay and help Amazon at the same time, in the eyes of Macron.
Doesn't media mail already do this (in the US)? If you're just sending books, the USPS will deliver them well below cost.
I'm not sure what effect it has on local shops.
Much more likely, we're witnessing a good old-fashioned lobbying effort bearing fruits at the expense of the consumer and in favor of a small but politically connected group of businesses.
Isn't there a better way, perhaps based on physical presence?
If anything the online market in France has more competition than most countries.
I am very surprised at how low this number is.
The only websites that give me an experience remotely similar are those of old, specialized publishers. Case in point (in French) :
- https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/collections
I also rather not have the book industry of a country dependent on the whims (and VC/bottomless pit of money to stay "competitive" while they crush a market) of an American company. Even more so one with no culture and no respect for the book as a work of the spirit whatsoever.
So there's that.
It's called competitiveness, baby, and it's easy peasy lemon squeezy!
In the last 4 quarters Lagardere lost $376M on $4B in revenue. While Amazon exploded to $29B on $443B in revenue. So more like 100 times bigger.
Edit: thank you! Of course one «want[s] more details», do you think this is the place to type 'Oh, by the way, do not wait for your wife to come home tonight' and just stop there as the rest may be unimportant?!
Interesting how Amazon charge a “centime”, which hasn’t been legal tender in France since 2002…
It’s funny how “book selling” went from being Amazon’s core business to a distraction.
Edit: I recommend EBay if you want to buy a physical tome.
The other side is a bit more complex, but Amazon is definitely subsidizing shipping costs from their yearly subscription and seller fees. The argument is that this is unfair to smaller companies which don't have capital to burn... and that is kind of true? I think there are valid points on both sides.
The fashionable thing to say, indeed!
Yet the anyones are all covertly buying from Amazon, working for Amazon, and investing in Amazon.
There are still some obscure items that, due to the sheer spread of Amazon, are incredibly difficult to get anywhere else, online or off - but that was Amazon's original market benefit to begin with. You could always get that weird book on Amazon that you couldn't get in the book store.
At the same time, I also realize that there are plenty of good things about their existence, as someone who grew up in an area without a good library.
Being good for a specific thing that is partially their fault (Amazon supports terrible intellectual property laws as much as any big company with their political donations, which prevents the market from being able to function efficiently; there's no reason Chinese sellers shouldn't be able to print out-of-print technical books, for example) doesn't make them good, or make me hate them any less.
I don't buy from Amazon, and I don't invest in Amazon, and I don't work for Amazon. I'm relatively consistent, but even people who aren't consistent aren't hypocrites for participating in society when they disagree with how it functions.
I think that voting isn't ideal, but I still vote, because it's available. This is pretty natural; it isn't some shocking abandonment of moral principles. Nor is using a company's services despite it being an awful actor in society because you can't afford anything else (partially because of their position and participation in society, which is worth pointing out).
I'm as capitalistic as anybody, but Amazon's a bad actor that's contributing to the destruction of capitalism by encouraging intellectual property laws and making political donations encouraging ending things that actually help the market like ePacket.
Anyway, I’m not sure what your point is. You can hate something and still use it. Especially if that something actively made it much harder to not use it. It’s the same with made in USA goods. Most people crave them. But thanks to our government and corporations, it’s difficult to do it - or at least, do it affordably. Does that mean people prefer made in China? Or that they’re just posturing when they say they don’t like made in China? No.
Rural voters are actually far more progressive than many people might think (over half of them are in favor of M4A, if we take polls of rural states at face value), but they vote based on the party line rather than who actually represents their interests. This is partially because of the destruction of education in rural states.
The same is true for citizens all over the country. Dianne Feinstein repeatedly kept flying a confederate flag over SF's city hall during the 80s, for example, but she's never lost a race; tell me that represents the will of the people: https://www.newspapers.com/image/460776332/
More generally, my limited understanding of French politics is that they have a very strong agricultural interest that's disproportionate to the populace, similar to the US. The limited news I read about French domestic politics indicates that their government generally accommodates and subsidizes non-urban citizens, much like ours does.
Edit: Here's the (Amazon) quote about rural concerns:
> Amazon said the legislation, adopted by parliament but not yet enacted, would punish those in rural areas who cannot easily visit a bookstore and rely on delivery.
how much of a difference does urban / rural divide make in France regarding such effects?
As for the current state of the "book industry" where I live: you have 4 choices, either Amazon, an independant bookstore, Decitre (a local bookstore chain), or FNAC (basically Amazon but with physical buildings). Independant bookstores are usually great at recommandations (way better than anything Amazon can do for example), but some of them are just a small-size FNAC, which kind of removes the point of an independant bookstore. As someone that almost only buy books when I know which book I want to buy, so I don't benefit a lot from independant bookstores, but people around me like them a lot.
That's a worse service than what I got before.
“Capitalism” is what people do when they’re not having sex (and sometimes even then). It is the most powerful economic engine we know about.
“Socialism” is the discipline of maximizing overall human welfare within the economic limits.
The engine and the steering wheel so to speak. I’m willing to bet those definitions are in no dictionary, but the basic point is roughly what no constitution has yet to get right.
The tricky bit is avoiding capture, and I’m optimistic we can do this without shooting all the lobbyists, but it would be a bargain even at that price.
Capitalism is when people does stuff.
Capitalism is a system where the Earth's resources and means of production (factories, machines, etc.) are privately owned.
You can have voluntary exchange without that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Probably the best balance between accessibility and rigor on why that’s provably utter nonsense is “Debt: The First 5000 Years” by David Graeber.
Now I know I’m going to piss off the Ayn Rand crowd, but I’m not concerned about that for two reasons:
1. Anyone who enjoys lectures about feeding the poor to one another written by an embittered old author living on fucking welfare is beyond my help. Bonus points: was tight with Greenspan who fucked up on, pretty much everything.
2. I don’t have an HN account older than some hackers with 1k karma on it because I play to the crowd. Quite the contrary. But as a cute sidebar: I make things people want. Never needed a Loopt-style backroom back rub.
Speaking of “culture” or religion, some practices are bad and better to die. We don’t live in caves anymore after all. It might feel nice to talk about unique culture and identity of isolated tribes in Amazon (the rainforest, not the company); trust me, you don’t want to be in some of these places if you are a woman or disabled.
Local shops need to find creative ways to do business (coffee offers, meet ups etc), instead of lobbying that governments kills competition. Or do something else.
Then 5 years later they'll complain that wages are down, local shops are closed up, the quality of products they bought went to hell, and the only thing their town has is a raggedy Walmart.
It's kind of hard to compete with a multinational trillion dollar corporation that actively seeks to crush your small business through unreasonably low prices and third world manufacturing just to eliminate future competition and secure a profit stream. And now that people thought they'd saved their town from Walmart, Amazon is coming in to clean out the rest.
It's so sad.
