France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#281

Post by coldtea » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #275

smabie wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I would rather have cheaper books/things, don't really care whether a book seller has respect for a book as a "work of spirit" whatever that means.

The poster with «work of spirit» probably meant "outcome of higher mental work and more, including intellectual". And expressed that it should be respected as a highly dignified product (as opposed to a piece of product conceived for consumerism). Nonetheless, i cannot really interpret that mention of Europe "as opposed to some rest". Edit: having seen further comments, I can. There are areas in Europe in which extre…

>There are areas in Europe in which extremely light judgement and behaviour is socially unpunished and considered normal, or "normal as an exception"

I'm not even sure what that means.

Is it about juvenile deliquency ("areas in Europe in which extremely light judgement and behaviour is socially unpunished and considered normal")

or some critique about how "elitists" are unbearable, making comments about things being worth more than their monetary value is beyond the pale, and the proper form of social being (that people - and peoples - should be "straigtened" to) is being a mass consumer?

If it's the latter, it manages to be way more patronizing that the "elitism" it's supposedly against, and unlike it, with no redeeming qualities either.

Or maybe it's about how in some cultures you're "straigtened" to behave like a public advertisement, marketing yourself, with faux politiness, well smoothed talk, and fake smiles -- and how some came to consider this the proper behavior, as opposed as a regression?

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#282

Post by mdp2021 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #281

mdp2021 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poster with «work of spirit» probably meant "outcome of higher mental work and more, including intellectual". And expressed that it should be respected as a highly dignified product (as opposed to a piece of product conceived for consumerism). Nonetheless, i cannot really interpret that mention of Europe "as opposed to some rest". Edit: having seen further comments, I can. There are areas in Europe in which extre…

> There are areas in Europe in which extremely light judgement and behaviour is socially unpunished and considered normal, or "normal as an exception" I'm not even sure what that means. Is it about juvenile deliquency ("areas in Europe in which extremely light judgement and behaviour is socially unpunished and considered normal") or some critique about how "elitists" are unbearable, making comments about things being…

No coldtea, it is about the betrayal against us elitists when one first takes the podium to declare the highest importance of the highest values, and flares around the Warning to those who have not yet chosen the path of Elevation, and has us all floating in hope, then starts pissing around the room and belches that "what else could you expect from population X anyway" before leaving - us all now unsure how to proceed. :) Can we be consistent? Please also see my edit to the other comment (the "wife"), to which you kindly replied and it was delightful to read it, so please do it more often without encouragement to have the Jekill check the Hyde.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#283

Post by lapinot » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

csee wrote: post #239

andreime wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> can they really then use that monopoly status to raise prices?

No, they can use this monopoly status to extract data or otherwise bully consumers (which they do). Private monopolies are inherently bad.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#284

Post by csee » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

lapinot wrote: post #283

csee wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> can they really then use that monopoly status to raise prices? No, they can use this monopoly status to extract data or otherwise bully consumers (which they do). Private monopolies are inherently bad.

Yeah I agree with that. I just don't think they can dump books effectively.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#285

Post by sgregnt » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #62

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is actually protecting the small book stores, right? 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 5…

In the long run it might hurt small book shops as well, as the number of new books published in France drops, especially books published by new authors (as they are less likely to sell at high prices) and the number of books people read drops overall so the whole industry shrinks overtime.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#286

Post by 908B64B197 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

Zababa wrote: post #93

As an anecdote, where I live Amazon has switched from Colis Privé to Colissimo. With Colis Privé, I used to always get my packages in my mailbox, even if they had to force it in a bit. Nothing was ever damaged because of this. With Colissimo, they come at usually 15h on a week day, may or may not call you, and either give the package to a neighbor or put it at the local post office. In short, the delivery went from g…

Just get an Amazon Locker.

https://www.amazon.com/ulp/view/

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#287

Post by 908B64B197 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #144

A lot of comments don’t seem to get the context of this. 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 lowe…

> 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.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#288

Post by rossamurphy » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

“French law prohibits free book deliveries but Amazon has circumvented this by charging a single centime (cent). Local book stores typically charge about 5-7 euros ($5.82-8.15) for shipping a book.”

Interesting how Amazon charge a “centime”, which hasn’t been legal tender in France since 2002…

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#289

Post by Zababa » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #286

Zababa wrote: post #93

As an anecdote, where I live Amazon has switched from Colis Privé to Colissimo. With Colis Privé, I used to always get my packages in my mailbox, even if they had to force it in a bit. Nothing was ever damaged because of this. With Colissimo, they come at usually 15h on a week day, may or may not call you, and either give the package to a neighbor or put it at the local post office. In short, the delivery went from g…

Just get an Amazon Locker. https://www.amazon.com/ulp/view/

So instead of going to the ground floor of my appartment building, opening my mail box, taking my package and going back home, I have to take a 7 minute walk to the train station, hope that it's open, take my package, and go back home.

That's a worse service than what I got before.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#290

Post by iggldiggl » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #258

reissbaker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but without copyright, anyone can copy and reprint any book that gets written, and the original author doesn't get paid.

Authors should get paid for the act of authoring. Not for selling copies after the fact. It's the labor that's valuable, not the result.

While I understand what you're getting at, how do you determine the actual value of the author's labour in advance, though?

Copyright allows you to speculatively publish a work and let that determination of how valuable your work actually was happen afterwards, by taking the number of people willing to pay for it as a proxy for your labour's value.