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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

#291

Post by benreesman »

_vbnz wrote: post #237
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

I’m fairly well versed in the barter -> coinage -> credit -> prosperity orthodoxy.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#292

Post by 908B64B197 »

Zababa wrote: post #289
908B64B197 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant, in your apartment's building lobby.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#293

Post by cromwellian »

mdp2021 wrote: post #271
cromwellian wrote: post #149

I don't even think Amazon wins on cost. It also wins on convenience and completeness. If I need to find a book or research on a subject, I'm not going to peruse a local book store, I'm going to use a Library Catalog, Amazon Search, or Google Search, from the convenience of my phone or desktop. Local book stores being the same price, or even cheaper, isn't likely to influence my initial tendency to preview on the Web…

> eventually local book shops value won't be in selling books You seem to forget about the public that wants (demands) a book retail warehouse. The median shopper does not exhaust the market.

> 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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#294

Post by mdp2021 »

cromwellian wrote: post #293
mdp2021 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eventually local book shops value won't be in selling books You seem to forget about the public that wants (demands) a book retail warehouse. The median shopper does not exhaust the market.

> 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 h…

> But do they demand a brick and mortar physical book retail warehouse that they have to commute to?

Yes, absolutely so. Correctly. The physical collection offers qualities that cannot be found otherwise; the direct contact is one, the browsing the mass of material is another, the environment (when properly created) another. We will reach to the other side of the world occasionally, and travel hundreds of miles normally.

It is very different from obtaining computer code, and in some ways more similar to purchasing cloth (which pretty much requires contact, properly and irregardless of custom).

> The vast majority of the public doesn't go to libraries

Just for this, first of all, there is a problem. You cannot drop a bit like "the vast majority don't wash" like an idle remark about the weather in front of a tsunami.

And to the point, in fact I was referring to «the public that wants (demands) a book retail warehouse». Those who are properly interested in the matter, not the casual user.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#295

Post by fmajid »

unity1001 wrote: post #254
wyoh wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as free health care or free education. You pay it through heavy taxation where France is the champion.

Compared to how US private healthcare sucks the blood out of Americans, French healthcare is pretty much 'free'.

Half of all US healthcare is paid for my the Federal government (Medicare, Medicaid and VA). Since the US spends nearly twice as much as a proportion of GDP and more since US GDP is higher, the Federal share of US health care alone is more than the entire French spending as a proportion of GDP.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#296

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

missedthecue wrote: post #269
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a wide gap between “forcing a business to exist” and 100% unfettered capitalism. My preference is to be somewhere along that spectrum, not at either end.

Fettered capitalism seems to just be whoever is closest to government getting special protection from competitors offering better prices and services. In this case, French book stores. Unless you own a French book store, the fettering of capitalism is making you poorer.

Yes, it can certainly be done well or poorly.

A “well” example: banning tobacco sales to kids.

A “poorly” example (IMO): requiring licenses for beauticians.

The French bookstore case can certainly be argued logically on both sides. Is our society best served (in every sense of the word) by a monoculture of highly efficient megacorps, or an array of smaller businesses?

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#297

Post by coldtea »

mdp2021 wrote: post #282
coldtea wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 procee…

>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?

Well, it has a certain historical consistency. Not sure I'd call it belching - Adorno, for example, quite known for such summary judgments, had impecable high class manners in every other way :) Exceptions, of course, know who they are. But this insistence of never generalizing is the enemy of thinking - which should be about trying to see above the particularities of individuals to be of any use.

But yes, I probably should give more context.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#298

Post by amluto »

panzagl wrote: post #134
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.

Ugh, this is going to sound pretentious, but here goes: 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…

I was actually thinking of fiction when I wrote that. I’ve only rarely seen a physical store that was good for browsing technical literature.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#299

Post by matheusmoreira »

iggldiggl wrote: post #290
matheusmoreira wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know. This is a problem society must eventually figure out. Perhaps crowdfunding or patronage is the answer?

I just know that intellectual property needs to go. In many ways it's already gone, these publishers just need to let it go.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#300

Post by rafaelturk »

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?

GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation; Europe's complex privacy regulations was meant to curb Google and Facebook abuse of cookies, data and power.

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..

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