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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

#91

Post by Arbalest »

markus_zhang wrote: post #80
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…

> 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. 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.

This was addressed by your parent post

> There are other things that are important aside from customer purchasing power.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#92

Post by supertrope »

xattt wrote: post #78
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…

> railroads 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.

The most useful railroad would be a single national rail network. Large network operators can refuse to interconnect or exchange traffic with small networks. When you’re small you want interoperability and FRAND tariffs to access the big networks. When you’re big you want to charge high rates, tie your other services with the dominant one, and sometimes refuse service to pressure small competitors into merging with you.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#93

Post by Zababa »

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 great to garbage.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#95

Post by UnFleshedOne »

bduerst wrote: post #79
WalterBright wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My meaning is a bit subtler than your interpretation. I was commenting on the practice of virtue signalling. For example, Seattle rebuilt and renamed the old Key Arena into Climate Pledge Arena. While I am a more ardent environmentalist than most (my virtue signalling duly noted) this name is a local pinnacle of vacuous virtue signalling nonsense.

Just FYI, Virtue Signalling is a pejorative that implicitly marginalizes and accuses someone of abnormal behavior. The GP here is calling that out even if you didn't specifically use the term "virtue signalling" in your original comment - the behavior here is entirely normal. The phrase's roots come from the alt-right looking for a replacement for SJW accusations not being taken seriously: https://rationalwiki.org/wi…

I don't think there is anything implicit in this phrase anymore -- it quite explicitly accuses someone of posturing instead of paying the honest price for signaling.

For example, a peacock's tail is a honest fitness signal -- it does take a lot of effort to maintain (in food and vulnerability) so it serves as a good signal for fitness.

Naming an existing place after a virtue you want to pretend to hold is an empty virtue signal.

Rezoning the city to reduce car traffic would be a honest virtue signal for the same virtue.

"Empty" is usually dropped from "empty virtue signaling", because why bother.

Alt-right association or origin don't make the phrase automatically invalid. You could even say pretending that it does is itself a virtue signaling in the derogatory sense.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#96

Post by bsder »

threatofrain wrote: post #61
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…

With regards to big players and economies of scale, it's notable that on the other side of the exchange we have more people brought into the fold than ever, whether we're talking about books, movies, or apps. Otherwise there wouldn't be any leverage by which to squeeze out smaller entities. In modern times, this is an incidental cost of access. There's also some understandable doubts about the long term results of th…

> With regards to big players and economies of scale, it's notable that on the other side of the exchange we have more people brought into the fold than ever, whether we're talking about books

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#97

Post by WalterBright »

tpush wrote: post #66
WalterBright wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in B+N last summer, and as I recall they had 6 full shelves of "Trump Is Bad" books. I amuse myself by collecting them, and have 36 so far (all different). I pick them up at the thrift store for a buck or two. I started a Biden collection, but only one book so far. Things that make you go hmmmm....

Presumably there are more "Trump is bad" (weird simplification, but ok) books than ones on Biden because a) Trump has been president longer and b) Trump's actions harmed more people.

> weird simplification

Nothing weird about it. Allow me to grace you with a smattering of some of the titles: "Above The Law", "A Warning", "American Carnage", "Collusion", "Commander In Cheat", "Devil's Bargain", "Disloyal", "Fear", "Hoax", "Fire and Fury", "Rage", "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", "Unbelievable", ...

Need I go on?

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#98

Post by jollybean »

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…

Some things are worth preserving, some are not.

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.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#99

Post by caslon »

coolso wrote: post #58
saurik wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this somehow supposed to be inconsistent? One normally doesn't hate Amazon because they are successful, but because they are too successful. This is like claiming making fun of someone who says they hate cigarettes or alcohol because they are "covertly" still using both all the time, or someone who says they hate the food at their school cafeteria despite "covertly" eating it... this "you don't get to say you hate…

Didn’t you hear? Losing your US-manufacturing job so everyone can buy cheap throwaway Chinese goods with loads of fake reviews is actually good for the economy, or something. You should be made fun of for thinking otherwise.

Actually, yeah. I'm the one who made the first anti-Amazon comment in this thread; Amazon encourages anti-global market practices with their political donations. This is a pretty good reason to hate them. They aren't pro-market, they're pro-Amazon. They support protectionism stateside.

A bigger market is a good thing, and something to encourage. By supporting broken/longer IP laws, software patents, and local-favoring of distributors, Amazon encourages a smaller, more centralized, more broken market.

Re: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon

#100

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

> It's not wrong.

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?

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