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 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).
I would welcome this. The French brick and mortar book stores are great and I love nothing more than spending hours at end walking through their aisles.
They typically look small from the outside but then they are built like mazes, retrofitted into the building they happen to inhabit, branching out left and right, up and down.They specialise in topics, apparently by preference of the owners. Around my corner I have one that focuses on psychology and urban planning for example.
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?
> The French brick and mortar book stores are great
> I'm from Germany and there we've had
Well, drop by at happily coincidentally current https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28976112 and drop note of some places, then. In a possible path: is the Waterstone in Bruxelles good as they say?
It just removes the price out of the equation. There will be any number of other factors pushing a customer to choose a store or another.
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.
This feels like a joke, but deciding on where/how to buy something completely ignoring the price (same everywhere) is refreshing.
There's few similar experiences, perhaps movie theaters before they started monthly plans/membership programs. I can't think of any other day to day instance where price comparison is explicitly rendered moot.
In situations like this the end user typically pays dears for that "luxury'.
Similar to cell phone service in Canada. Prices are carefully negotiated with carriers and as a results Canadians pay some of the highest cell phone fee in the world.
Getting fake or low quality garbage from Amazon has made me stop using their product most entirely. I have 0 faith in it and I will gladly pay the inconvenience of driving or 5-10% more for a retail store brand.
There's some percentage of people that always want to pay the lowest price and if the product turns out to be fake they return it. Say you order 100 things over a month and 5% turn out to be fake the only cost is time (Amazon pays for shipping if the product is fake I believe). That's compared to paying 10% more on every product plus the time it takes to go to the store.
Honestly if I can’t trust that a company is delivering a real product or not I’m OUT. That’s a violation of trust. And it’s happened to me multiple times on Amazon—nowhere else.
> 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.
how about intentionally flawing the book by adding a line with a pen somewhere or similar. that's how I have it seen done in Germany to bypass price fixing.
Depends on what you mean by that, but if it's about getting lower prices, the consumer probably "lost" more than a decade ago.
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.
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.
When you pay workers less than what they need to survive, you externalize the wage to society.
When you use temps in stead of real employees, you externalize their healthcare etc. as well.
When you sell books in Europe, but you don't pay taxes like European bookstores, you externalize that as well.
When you use predatory pricing for more than a decade, and it kills off real bookstores, that's an externality as well.
When you ship items one by one with trucks and planes, you have a large CO2 footprint. Again an externality.
Amazon is not some genius new high-tech business model, winning because they are smarter than everyone else. It's just low wages, predatory pricing, tax avoidance and disregard for the environment.
> but you don't pay taxes like European bookstores
If true, this isn't Amazon's fault, and it's not an externality either. If there's a loophole in the tax law, the onus is on the EU or France to fix it, the onus isn't on Amazon to voluntarily give extra money above and beyond what's required. No business ever does this. Moreover, price fixing books doesn't fix the tax loophole.
> large CO2 footprint.
That's why I said "They may have some externalities", similar in extent to many other businesses that operate in the physical world. Per-shipped item, Amazon probably has the least amount of externalities compared to other bookstores thanks to operational efficiency, so on the carbon externality point they should be celebrated (on a relative basis). Also, this is an argument for a carbon price, not an argument for price fixing of books.
> externalize the wage // externalize their healthcare
These aren't externalities. Amazon pays enough money for them to live. If the public votes to give them extra handouts then that isn't Amazon's fault. You would also need to make the argument that low-skilled labor on aggregate would be earning more money if Amazon wasn't around, which is a claim I strongly dispute. Part of the improvement in operational efficiency is passed on as superior wages relative to other low-skilled labor.
> It's just low wages, predatory pricing, tax avoidance and disregard for the environment.
Strong disagree. It is high wages (relative to market rates for that skill tier), competitive pricing, tax compliance, less pollution on a per-item basis, PLUS extreme operational efficiency and economies of scale/physical network effects (the latter in this list being the most dominant explanatory variable).
Amazon also pays its workers dimes and lets the social programs make up for it - like how workers in US use foodstamps etc. There is more than one way to dump the cost onto the society.
It's not actually possible to work at Amazon and qualify for food stamps, unless you are a single parent with multiple children. Amazon simply pays too much.
For this argument to make sense, you would first have to show that in the absence of Amazon, low-skilled labor on aggregate (including the people currently working there) would be making more than they currently are making. If it turns out that they would be making less, then it's not a coherent argument because it means that Amazon's presence has caused welfare costs to go down.
An example. Suppose someone is working at the best job they could find for $8/hour, and I decide to hire them for $15/hour. Am I "dumping the cost onto society"? Maybe you could frame it that way, but in reality my contribution has been to reduce the burden on society by $7/hour.
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.
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 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.
For what it's worth, obscure books will come from small sellers that won't rely on Amazon's warehouses.
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.
You'll get better prices if you look off amazon at one of the used book metasearch engines, like used.addall.com. You're also far more likely to end up ordering from a small, local store. To save on postage, you might order from one near you (or even pick up the book.)
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.
Before Amazon, I had to travel all the way to London to get a decent book store. Even then I was lucky if they had 100 books on physics total. God forbid you want a choice of more than 1 tomb on semiconductors.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't know, but I'd seriously doubt Amazon could make a dent on its business considering it's French and has been selling online almost as long as Amazon.
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.
Does that monopoly result in increased cost for the customer? I assume there is harm to the general economy the problem is quantifying that and also convincing people to pay more for something.
Yeah. More people writing books, writers making more money, therefore producing more content, people ending up being able to read better, more books as a result - pretty bad for the consumer.
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 for carrying all of that material.
Writing tip, if you think something is going to sound pretentious, then replace all instances of 'you' with 'I'. Usually that will help with the tone. I find I sometimes tend to assume my own personal experiences will match everyone else's experience, which usually is not the case in the end. So, instead of trying to convince people what the "right way" to bookshop is, just give your perspective as another point to the conversation.
It's not pretentious, it's true. The "Programming" section of chain bookstores would always be not-very-many shelves of "Teach Yourself X in Y Days" or "X for Dummies" books. I don't remember ever seeing any of the seminal books for noobies like "The C Programming Language" or SICP at Barnes & Noble/Borders/Chapter 11.
I did pickup quite a few good computer related books at The Strand, then again they have millions of books on site to browse. In fact i did get my C programming book there, my awk book and also a fun book called my googlewhack adventure. Also a book by microsoft publishing that gives a bottom to top view of computers (i forget the title) and an absurd Pop-Up book about computers and telecoms in the 80s
In Bedford MA there was a store called (IIRC) Softpro which was all software/CS/etc. I was sad when it closed, but what good is a store if the only time you can access it is once a quarter when you're in town for a project review?
Yeah - it is just a simple matter of numbers as opposed to pretentiouses or humblebragging. The number of people interested in a book is highest for the surface/casual level and it is seldom that there will be enough demand for often expensive and slow to move texts. There isn't much call for say republishing of authenic 19th century surgical technique books. Maybe some casual readers would buy it at a lower price point but almost certainly not if it is several hundred dollars.
Amazon does offer recommendations based on an algorithm while a book store either has similar books all in one section ordered in a more traditional fashion (maybe alphabetical).
> 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.
From the context, I think they were talking about discovery, not whether the books are available for purchase on Amazon.
Personally I don't think I've ever become aware of an interesting book via Amazon, but I've also never used it for discovery. Certainly you have to troll through a lot of nonsense results even when you have a good idea of what you're looking for.
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.
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 incrementally kills local industry, including the local culture industry. TV, railroads, chain stores, Wal-mart, you name it -- they are all killing something local.
I'd also note that, at least in my experience, the "book culture" in France is much more than we think of even small booksellers in the US.
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.
Yeah, we have some decent sized book festivals here in NYC, but they’re still relatively small. Brooklyn Book fest is one of the larger ones in NYC and the attendance number I found is about 35k people. The one in Lyon you mentioned seems to be at around 65k, in a city less than 1/10 the size of NYC.
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 the United States Robert Bork advanced the “consumer welfare” philosophy of anti-trust policy. It allows for monopolies that provide lower prices or better products/service even if competition is crushed. In the European Union loss of competition is a harm per se.
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 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.
> 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.
True, but the more important thing than even the card catalog was that once you found one book, there were other books on the stacks "right next to the found book" due to the fact that the books were organized by either the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal systems.
Consequently, your searches had a built in "proximity" result--which would give you more knowledge and keywords to do your next search with.
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.
> 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 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.
I know you don't mean to imply this ... but this is a bit condescending.
Walmart probably more than anything else has uplifted the lives of the bottom 1/3 and given them to live at the material standard of living rivalling the middle class.
The truth is - most things we use, we don't need very high quality.
Your plates, knives, glasses? They'll outlast you.
Your clothes will as well, unless you're using them for labour, in which case people know quality matters.
The basketball you buy is not going to get worn out any time soon.
But the ability to be cookery, deck chairs, plastic anything, video games, music, sporting good, bedding etc. is basically transformational.
I do think there are quality issues (and cultural) here and there but for most part it's a pretty big win.
> 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 quality of life.
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.
> Most centralization incrementally kills local industry
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.
Australia here. It is an old classic. Emphasis on old. Up to about 2000 seemingly every house had a copy and possibly more than one copy as the various StarWars etc variations came out.
But our house doesn't have it and I'd be fine if my kid never saw it.
The world of modern boardgaming is so much more varied and fun.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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 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.
Did any of those advantages exist before Amazon was massive? Or did Amazon become massive because it was providing better service?
Online ordering is complicated for Amazon because Amazon is massive. It is not that complicated for small bookstores, who absolutely are using computerized inventory (at least every small bookstore I’ve ever been to has). Even if online ordering isn’t an option, “call your friendly bookstore employee to order” is an option. That’s what I mean by not being lazy - you can jump to excuses and asking the government to help, or you can come up with creative solutions to serve your customers.
Speaking of COVID, there actually are strong parallels. At the start of the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants just gave up and closed - they didn’t even attempt to find creative solutions. Other restaurants - presumably the ones with less lazy and/or stuck-in-their-ways owners - came up with creative solutions. They did takeout. They made stay-at-home craft projects to foster community over social media. They offered cooking classes with local meal kit delivery. They adapted their restaurants to facilitate delivery and takeout. Several restaurants actually ended up with larger, more prosperous businesses.
Also: it may strain your imagination, but Amazon was large and successful _before_ they had a delivery network. And they continued to grow because they provided better service, even when they were dependent on UPS and USPS. French booksellers (and all booksellers) could have chosen to improve their service in the face of competition for the years it took Amazon to create a delivery network.
At least in the US (maybe the French could copy if it doesn’t work like this) local shipping via post is actually very fast; very likely within two days if it doesn’t need to go to a distribution center. Amazon has to build thousands of warehouses to take advantage of that; grandpa’s local bookseller can naturally take advantage of that geographic locality to customers. Or they could team up with other booksellers and form a shipping alliance/partnership (this also exists among US local bookstores). Shoprunner exists. There are creative solutions beyond just giving up and asking the government to make books more expensive for everyone.
Local booksellers (the good ones, anyway) are doing fine in the US, even post-COVID. So I don’t really know why you’re making excuses for them. The French people deserve to get great service from their local booksellers.
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.
See, this is _exactly_ why the government doesn’t need to step in to break the market.
Running a large online store is hard! Harder than running a small local business. Amazon.com has a giant fraud target painted on its back. Local stores can make a strong case for being more ethical and for shopping local. I would think, given the position of labor in French society, that it would be easy to get people to choose local if it is even somewhat close in terms of price and service.
The fake stuff on Amazon is a great case for skipping them entirely. The fact that (apparently) the government thinks that local booksellers cannot compete with a fraud/scam-riddled, employee-abusing marketplace is a giant red flag. Being a victim of fraud, and having to worry about fraud, is actually very inconvenient IMO.
I shop local when local means better service, better quality, locally-sourced ingredients, a better browsing experience (especially applicable to books), or really any other advantage. The bar for not buying online is on the floor; the only people to blame for small business not clearing that bar are small business owners.
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 opportunistic moves of politicians is still the same xenophobic arbitrarily designated wrongness.
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.
By local industry, you're actually talking about fragmented industry. It's only local to the locals, of whom there are far fewer than, well, literally everyone else.
Centralization is also densification, which has merits backed by scientific research. It's, in theory, better for everyone - well, for everyone else.
They’ll probably go the way of vinyl records, something more special than the regular stuff and for showing off or just for the extra pleasure of it. Ironically, closer to the way books and records were held before mass production.
I’ve changed my mind about this. ebooks should make more sense, but people just like paper. And why not? We spend so much time in screens it’s nice to have things that are physical.
Well, I like a mix. Stuff that is searchable is nice for non-fiction, especially tech stuff. Being able to change fonts and font size is nice too, but I agree, a smallish paper book is better to hold.
I had a Kindle for a few years, but I like paper books. After a long day at work, it's nice to relax with something that would survive a coronal mass ejection or nuclear EMP.
Unfortunately, the modern world is such that when the IT goes down the only use you will want for a paper book is as something to, well, kindle a fire with.
Government can be said to there to protect people from themselves in some cases. If Amazon ran the world, 90% of us would be wage-slaves with no benefits.
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.
With this mentality, we'd have as many cultures as we have social networks... Pretty much one global dominant network. If that's the world you want, that's fine.
People are driven by biological impulses. It seems reasonable to me to want to protect yourself from your own future impulses.
I remember reading about an experiment at Google where they reduced snacking by simply putting an opaque cover on the snacks. When people see chocolate bars, there is a chance they'll turn and get one. They may consider they made the decision rationally but they didn't.
In moments of rationality, it seems reasonable to me to devise and legislate ways to protect yourself from future impulses. It's a paradox for sure, but our impulsive/rationale nature is the source of the paradox, and is unavoidable.
When you "ask" the market by offering food, people may rush to the high-calory fastfood offerings. In a moment of reason, you may want to regulate this (e.g. ban fast food ads around kids), so that you don't live in an obese-ridden society.
That sounds a lot like consent manufacturing to me. "The Berlin Wall is to protect you from future impulses that could get you exploited by the bourgeoisie."
To prevent a tragedy of the commons type situation. I may think that local businesses are better than online monopolies. However, my purchasing decisions, whether I change to local or buy online, will have a negligible effect on the market. Might as well save myself some money if I won't be saving local businesses.
If everyone thinks like this then the tragedy of the commons occurs. Everyone prefers local businesses to exist over the online monopoly, but nobody changes their purchasing behavior from what is cheap and convenient. By voting restrictions on online monopolies people avert the tragedy of the commons by coordinating (and compelling) what they want.
I think it’s more of a collective action problem [0]. People believe that it is better for society in the long run if everyone buys books at bookshops but for each individual it doesn’t make sense for them to buy books at a bookshop.
Not a big fan of Amazon but I also find it ridiculous and self-sacking to fixate on obsolete ideas. If you have to force a business to exist, maybe it doesn’t need to exist.
I don't think books are obsolete, many people still enjoying reading them, and buying them. Also, there are plenty of government subsidized programs that are popular with people. No economic model can perfectly match our sensibilities. We as a society protect things that we think need protection. It's really as simple as that.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that in this case they're "forcing" business to exist, rather help existing (and often struggling) local business against bigger (mostly foreign) business who use economy of scales (or willingness to not take a profit for a few years in order to corner a market) to offer the same service cheaper
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.
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?
Maybe that exact thinking paved ways for corrupt monopolies. There is a thin line between trying to force a business to exist vs forcing a huge conglomerate from extinguishing businesses with its money.
It’s forced obsoleting. Forced existence is the pushback. There are better methods though I agree. When we finally bring more manufacturing back to the US I think that’ll be a natural way to put a damper on Amazon’s harm to our country
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.
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", ...
Yeah. So many problems caused by businesses who simply refuse to die. Their time has passed but they simply refuse to go away and let humanity move on. The entire copyright industry for example.
Physical books are valuable. Some people just prefer them over ebooks. As physical items, making and distributing copies is non-trivial and costs money. Due to their scarce nature, it actually makes sense to sell them.
Under a no-copyright model, people willing to pay for physical books isn't directly linked to publishers/printers still willing to pay the author, though.
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.
There at least one big online book selling store in France that will benefit from this law if it passes.
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.
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..
So, basically Amazon is in a win-win situation. If the status quo prevails, they're happy. If they have to start charging for shipping, maybe some customers go to a local bookstore but Amazon also has a legal mandate to make more profit in their book sales by not subsidizing shipping out of the wholesale margin. And while some people will buy local a bit more, Amazon sells so many things and the local store may still have to order your book and get it to you slower than Amazon, keeping Amazon as the most convenient option... I don't see a long-term downside for Amazon here.
There are laws preventing price dropping on new books.
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.
To put in context, France is pretty small, approximatively fitting a 1 000 x 1 000 km box.
Delivering goods produced in France to French people isn't as complex as shipping stuff worldwide, and local players do under 2 days delivery for a while now, with ~3h delivery if you're willing to go to a nearby shop of the franchise.
Also, local delivery services can suck, and your 1 day delivery just ends up being a trip to a random post office 1 week later as they close during your work hours.
All in all, Amazon's advantage is on product variety and consistent customer experience. For best-seller books, that's a lot less of an edge.
After complete price equality, I don't think it will be possible to have mandatory equal delivery times, so surely Amazon will still win out based on faster delivery.
They still mostly rely on the local infrastructure. Even going through gig economy based approaches won't set them apart from the other players doing the same.
Amazon is dominant, but not as much as we would tend to believe. It was forced to stop operations in France for a few weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, and demand just shifted around, service wasn't worse, delivery times weren't very different considering the situation. Comparing it to the effect of AWS shutting down, it was pretty unexpected.
Does Amazon really not have it's logistics built out that much in France? In the US local infrastructure is basically just last-mile delivery except for more rural areas.
Also IIRC, Amazon shutdown at the begining of covid because of labor relations and a court order prohibiting shipment of anything but medical supplies-- not directly connected to it's general logistics and shipment capabilities.
They have extended logistics, but there is enough parallel infra used by all the other players that I personally don't see a difference (Amazon is not much faster to me, and sometimes worse).
On the Amazon shutdown, yes, it was strongly political and societal, not an operational error. I was just looking at it as a natural experiment on what happens when Amazon as a store stops.
Oh good one. I guess at the end thats what these comapnies want. If they cant get market share through prices they'll do it in other ways as long as there is a level playing field.
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.
Amazon doesn't even order books anymore in many cases.
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.
I'm not sure media mail is really below cost: it gets shipped on a space-available basis on the trucks, which is why it can take longer to arrive. So it's really only processed when there's excess capacity that would have gone unused. $3 for postage is probably going to cover marginal costs here.
I'm curious whether French independent bookstores have been harmed much by Amazon. In the US, Amazon has probably actually been a boon — the number of independent bookstores has grown dramatically over the last decade, in part because Amazon squashed the previous era's giant book retailers like Borders and Barnes and Noble, who had been crushing independent bookstores.
To all posters who harp on the "this is stupid" theme: I do agree, but saying this is imo short-sighted.
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.
All for a way to protect small businesses which actually pay local taxes vs. Amazon which doesn't pay taxes in the US at all - but not sure a minimum ship price is the best approach.
Isn't there a better way, perhaps based on physical presence?
It's funny that we still pin Amazon against bookstores - I was under the impression that Amazon is shipping _everything_ those days, and that books are not what most people go to Amazon for any more.
Discovery on Amazon is pretty bad. I've never picked a book there after having serendipitously finding my way to it. But I've done exactly that in bookstores countless times.
The only websites that give me an experience remotely similar are those of old, specialized publishers. Case in point (in French) :
I think resisting change only takes you so far. Let systems become efficient. Centralized systems like Amazon will find an antidote in decentralized ones like Shopify. We don't miss horse carriages but I am sure they were part of daily life a 100+ years ago. Disruption and change is part of life.
I'd rather not have them race to the bottom to "remain competitive".
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.
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 extremely light judgement and behaviour is socially unpunished and considered normal, or "normal as an exception". (In other areas, nobody with that trait could have reached, say, 18 years of age without getting "straightened".) It must be noted that those areas have a mixed population: some will behave """antisocially""" while many will remain absolutely lovely - it is just tolerance of juvenile thought and behaviour misunderstood by some """beneficiaries""" as acceptance or approval, instead of patience.
>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?
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.
>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.
For 2019, before the pandemic, parent company Lagardere made about $200 million on $7 billion in revenue. Amazon made $11B on $280B in revenue. So 40-50 times bigger.
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.
I have restrained myself from much better jokes today. But if it was not a joke, why do not you argue about it?
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?!
>But if it was not a joke, why do not you argue about it?
Well, it was neither a joke, nor an argument, that's why. It was a proposition/value judgement expressed in jest.
But if you want more details, it's based on the belief that the idea being that "laissez-faire" was not a good concept to begin with.
And despite being invented in France back in the day, was never really popular in France or Europe in general (Austrian economists excepted), where the "government is the enemy" idea didn't really took hold in the populace either.
We like our social democracy and government regulating some things, thank you very much.
So, unless you chance on the statistically atypical (aside from echo bubbly HN/VC style circles) european who hates "government" not for/when doing bad shit, but for being government, and wants no restrictions imposed on corporations, it is more thought of as something neoliberal / Thacherite / Ayn-Rand-loving types would have as their motto - and unironically have their militarry enforce to countries who didn't like it.
This seems to be incentivising the customer to shop in-person instead of online and seems spectacularly uninspired, they could have simply waived taxes on books for companies headquartered in France? Or really anything that isn't simply forcing the customer to pay shipping?
In my country such thing is discretionary for IRS. They would have to request accounting books and go through probably billions of transactions. Plus political pressure.
“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…
Amazons book selling business has been getting worse. It’s hard to search hard to find books, or books with common names. Shipping times are nothing special.
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.
Is there a word for laws that disproportionately affect people in rural areas so that a government can play protectionist for urban companies? I hate Amazon as much as anyone, but in this case they're definitely not wrong, even if they're probably lying about their reasoning.
Specific quote is:
> Imposing a minimum shipping cost for books would weigh on the purchasing power of consumers.
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.
They may not be subsidizing shipping at all beyond the amount they would normally discount new books, but law prohibits such discounting as well. Books could be a loss leader here, but I'm not sure of it.
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 something if you use it" take is ridiculous.
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:
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.
> it quite explicitly accuses someone of posturing instead of paying the honest price for signaling.
Not really. I see the accusation used almost exclusively to refer to any time someone deliberately associates themselves publicly with any view that is opposed by the viewer. It's literally just a meaningless accusation thrown at someone who disagrees with you about something.
Fist someone presents their leftist point of view as truth on something called 'rational wiki', then someone posts it on HN with 'Just FYI'. I'm missing an 'explanatory reporting' by a 'neutral news outlet' for my culture war bullshit bingo.
All names of professional sports stadiums are arbitrary and vacuous. It's not like there was some "real name" the building had that got surreptitiously erased or covered up by "virtue signalers."
Not really. It was called Key Arena before because Key Bank funded it. It was good advertising for them. The buildings on college campuses are also named after their donors. It acknowledges who paid for it.
Names can also just be for fun, like the Seattle Space Needle. The Emerald City is also the official nickname for Seattle.
Climate Pledge Arena is about as fun as "eat your broccoli, it's good for you."
Key Bank bought the naming rights and named it "Key Arena." Amazon bought the naming rights and called it "Climate Pledge Arena." The only sense in which one of those arbitrary names is "virtue signaling" and the other isn't it that some people just don't like it when anyone mentions climate change in public.
Amazon doing it doesn't make it any less virtue signalling. I'd be much more impressed if Amazon had used the money instead to buy some forest land and turned it into a nature conservancy. I wouldn't be critical of calling that "Climate Pledge Park".
And also, the whole reason Amazon named it that is because they are pledging to make the arena powered by renewable energy. You can certainly argue how significant that is, but it certainly doesn’t seem all that different from buying a park and naming it after climate change.
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.
Nah, we've successfully reduced spending on Amazon by >90% in our household.
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.
Yep-- high risk during covid and lack of local delivery capacity, not to mention empty store shelves, meant Amazon Fresh was the alternative. I was fortunate that literally just a few weeks before the shutdown I had been sick and couldn't go foodshopping so I used Fresh for the first time. That made me an existing customer, and when the shutdown hit they weren't taking new ones.
Even then, I was up to 1:00am in the morning a lot of times waiting for delivery slots to open. And then Amazon began releasing delivery slots incrementally throughout the day, which probably made it more equitable but also meant I had to constantly refresh the checkout page a dozen times an hour to get one instead of being quick on the draw after midnight.
Yeah, we were lucky in that we had a couple good options locally for produce other than Whole Foods too. The Safeway has gotten really bad, and the mail services I tried were all over the place.
I hate Amazon because of their refusal to free their stack despite using and distributing plenty of AGPL software. I hate Amazon because they push software patents. I hate Amazon because they're anti-union. I hate Amazon for lots of reasons.
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.
I’ve cut back on my Amazon purchases 90%. It’s been nice visiting actual stores and getting something same-hour. Sometimes I pay a dollar or two more. But buying local(er) feels good for my soul. It’s nice not having to wonder if every single positive review is real or fake, or if real, if it’s accurate. It’s also nice not having to sift through direct-from-China products with extremely strange names and poorly written box descriptions.
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.
I don't know if there's a word for that, but it certainly seems like it would be exceedingly rare. Don't people in rural areas have vastly disproportionately large representation in government, public spending per capita, etc.? Of course, I'm just basing this on my intuition in the United States. My intuition could be way off, or France could be quite different.
People in rural areas have disproportionately large representation in government, but this doesn't mean their representation actually represents them. By and large rural politicians go against the will of their voter bases and over the past fifty years have contributed to the decline of important things like rural schooling, sort of cementing the "bad representation" problem.
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/
I agree that representatives don't actually represent the wishes of pretty much anyone who isn't extremely wealthy, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that this problem is worse for rural populations than urban populations.
I can't read the full article thanks to the paywall so maybe I'm missing it, but: where is the urban protectionism here?
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.
People living in the cities will now be able to buy a book significantly cheaper than someone living in a rural area. And a bookstore in a city will be able to outcompete a rural one, since they'll have more local sales but the rural bookstore will not be able compete on price for the mail orders.
* Accepting Amazon's claim: this strikes me more as the removal of a rural subsidy (cheap delivery to hard to reach places, Amazon skipping out on every tax they can to lower prices) than the imposition of an urban one. Maybe a distinction without difference economically, but it's an important political distinction.
* Not accepting the claim: wouldn't this support rural bookstores? Amazon's conceit here is that people want convenience, which a local rural bookstore surely provides over an urban one for rural dwellers. Whether they "compete" with urban bookstores is sort of a red herring, given that (small) bookstores qua businesses tend to be labors of passion that aren't looking to edge out some distant urban competitor. That doesn't mean they can (or should) go broke, just that the economics aren't necessarily a dog fight between rural and urban.
A rural bookstore won't have sufficient density of local customers to be viable. They need to make additional sales from somewhere. That "somewhere" has to be mail order, where they maybe could be competitive due to lower costs. But now they can't actually compete.
(This is all purely hypothetical, and explaining how the statement could be true. Probably it isn't, since there's no way an indie bookstore competes on price with Amazon.)
Seems like a harsh but fair move on France's part to stop unfairly subsidizing rural areas. Honestly living in rural areas should cost more - maintenance of infrastructure, power, etc are significantly more costly for rural areas in a way that's not nearly accounted for by their tax base.
If you don't have incentives for rural living you 1) depopulate your food production labor base and 2) don't have people in a place that will defend it with force.
This probably sounds crazy, but I think the best way to incentivize food production laborers is to pay them a fair wage.
Rural areas have a mix of the estates of the top net worth individuals and the laborers who work there. The wealthy are subsidized along with the working class. It makes more sense to stop subsidizing the rural areas entirely and then pay the working class fair wages.
As for defending the rural areas with force, that's the whole point of having a national military - it's not like we're going to forcibly conscript everyone just because they happen to live in the region.
I don't know about France but in the US the number of high net worth individuals who live in rural areas without making their money there (e.g. big farm owners, mine owners, etc.) is very small.
Oh, this was my mistake. It's not a paywall, it's just asking me to register to continue to read for free. Says something about my advertising blindness.
Perhaps we need a new term for this, encompassing both paywalls and "registration walls".
"Dating wall" perhaps? Whether it's asking you to pay up, or just to register an account, it's still asking you to enter into a relationship with the content provider, and you bounce off because you'd rather not have that relationship.
Relationships are a burden, there's only so many one can keep track of.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Basically prices will rise for French due to poor competitiveness. This is a growing trend and will not be limited to books.
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.
One problem is a lot of people really will buy the cheapest thing without even thinking about it.
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.
Yeah, let's replace all world cultures with monoculture of McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Disneyland. After all, US being able to pour printed money at absurd quantities means it has the best culture in the world, and all the others vastly inferior?..
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...