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France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

reuters.com

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Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#231

Post by lotsofpulp »

bserge wrote: post #210
lotsofpulp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The other two options are poor people go without completely, or rich people share their wealth with poor people and lower their quality of life so poor people can raise their qualit…

I still don't see how a millionaire giving away 1/10 of his wealth lowers their quality of life. Unless you think a QoL of 15/10 is acceptable.

I don't know what 15/10 means, but the point is one of the options involves people that have something to give it up to benefit others, at their loss, no matter how small it may really be.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#232

Post by tonyedgecombe »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #25
rafaelturk wrote: post #8

My experience tells me that the practical outcome of this new regulation is that shipping will become more expensive for books. 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.

Most government proposed solutions create new problems instead of fixing the original? Do you have any data to back that claim up?

>Most government proposed solutions create new problems instead of fixing the original?

Do you have any data to back that claim up?

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#233

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

chrisseaton wrote: post #148
amluto wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m suspicious that Amazon sells fewer books than a good physical bookstore. In a bookstore, people find books they didn’t know they want, and I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon. Similarly, Amazon does not produce the “whole I’m already here, I might as well buy something else” effect. I’ve long thought that the publishers have has their whole business model wrong in quite a few ways.

> I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon Probably a lack of your own imagination. There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon.

> There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon

To the extent that the masses of reprinted-as-a-book Wikipedia articles, CC-licensed and public-domain content, or even GPT-generated books don’t sneak into Amazon’s selection.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#234

Post by bserge »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #231
bserge wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see how a millionaire giving away 1/10 of his wealth lowers their quality of life. Unless you think a QoL of 15/10 is acceptable.

I don't know what 15/10 means, but the point is one of the options involves people that have something to give it up to benefit others, at their loss, no matter how small it may really be.

15 out of 10, meaning you're living way beyond comfortable.

That's the kind of rich I talk about when I say "rich", btw, not some doctor or lawyer.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#235

Post by blub »

n8cpdx wrote: post #192
throwaway789257 wrote: post #50

France has a long history of attempting to protect its cultural industries, including film and publishing. 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 inc…

> 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. 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 advanta…

If we're talking about online, Amazon's probably better than small bookstores at delivery, service and availability. OTOH, they tend to treat their employees famously badly and since a few years their online stores are flooded by cheap crap, including fake books(!), to the point that it's a pain to actually find something of quality for many product categories. Their recommendations are just ads for irrelevant and cheap books.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#236

Post by blub »

Nasrudith wrote: post #222
n8cpdx wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 advanta…

Why do they jump to it? Tribalism and xenophobia, the latter is one of the few socially acceptable ways of expressing it against "acceptable" targets. It doesn't matter that Bob's Books does a shit job he is one of us. Outside businessmen are The Other. I mean the last time that sort of thing was judged negatively was response to Post US Civil War lynching of "carpetbaggers". Hell the modern use of it for opportunist…

Is the US some paradigm of fairness toward foreign companies or are we just having a philosophical conversation about what may be in an ideal world?

Some level of protectionism is very beneficial for a country.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#237

Post by _vbnz »

benreesman wrote: post #152

I apologize in advance for generalizing here and there. The point holds. “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 th…

> “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.

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

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#238

Post by csee »

flexie wrote: post #223
option wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so the consumer loses here

No, Jeff Bezos loses. Everyone else wins. Yes, the consumer pays more for a book but he also lives in an economy with better paid jobs, free healthcare, free education, and more competing bookstores. Amazon's low costs is only possible because they externalize their costs to society.

No, Amazon's low costs are because of scale economies and physical network effects. Exxon's low costs are because they externalize the costs to society. Let's be accurate. They may have some externalities but it's not a big part of their business.

Also price fixing the books doesn't imply better paid anything, there's no large causal connection there.

Overall this is a win for pirates, inefficient booksellers and Amazon's margins. The anti-dumping perspective is a farfetched narrative given it isn't actual dumping, it's just very low margin selling, and moreover bookselling isn't a natural monopoly and has low barriers to entry so dumping incentives don't really exist.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#239

Post by csee »

andreime wrote: post #195
BurningFrog wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is actually protecting the small book stores, right? Looks like it's protecting everyone except the book buying consumer.

one could argue that in the long term book buying consumers are protected from a monopoly that would probably appear

I find this argument overly theoretical and unsupported. Book selling isn't a natural monopoly. If Amazon dumped books and forced out everyone, can they really then use that monopoly status to raise prices? The market has a fairly low barrier to entry and any attempt to have high margin pricing would be met with new competition pretty quickly.
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