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.
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).