France regulates books prices very heavily (a.k.a it's a single price for every single distribution point), meaning there's little to no interest buying books online / at a mall (except convenience sometimes). In contrast, it allows a dense network of specialized libraries to maybe not thrive, but at least survive.
In turn, those libraries create events, participate to the cultural life of their neighbourhoods, create social links.
In the end, it makes it very easy to find a book store, get good advice, create links with sellers (I spend hours talking with the shopkeeper at my comics place), and take an interest in the medium.
So it's not really a random singularity happening there, but also in part the result of a very specific books policy. And of course, the cultural legacy is also super strong !
Germany has regulated book prices too ("Buchpreisbindung"), but Amazon thrives and the small book shops do not really. If anything, that must be more the culture.
I think you're right that the law preserved the original culture indeed, not that it created one. I must confess that even as a moderate hobbyist, I don't know more than a couple of german authors.
It's a fair fear, but I'd guess my consumption rate for books slightly exceeds my former consumption rate for paper books. I don't always have my Kindle on me, but I almost always have my phone on me, which makes dipping into a book via the Kindle app easy as my digital distraction of choice.
(Though of course there are competing distractions, like HN and social media.)
I am constantly glued to my kindle. I LOVE the idea of being to have almost any title I want instantly. The kindle basically changed my life since I moved to an area without a local bookstore. I read all. the. time. And I'm not an outlier. Not everyone has amazing bookstores near them.
And this is the strong argument for purchasing online. When I lived in Boston it was fun to spend a few hours on the weekend perusing book stores. When I moved to a less urban place I had only large bookstores in suburban strip mall hell to choose from. My dislike for driving kept me from going to them.
Now, with a Nook, I love the ability to finish a book at night, realize I want to read longer, and purchase another one immediately. I don't have to plan ahead. There are a lot of upsides to purchasing them online. But, I do miss the culture and community of small bookstores.
I have 2 kindles and have yet to read a book on them. (One is a digital remote, the other in a drawer somewhere) I strongly prefer paper, and settle for my phone or pc otherwise. Toting a kindle is as big a pain as a book, and much more fragile. Unless I needed a refrence of hundreds, whats the point? I seldom if ever read 2 books at once. Books don't need charging, or a 3rd party. Its a solution in search of a problem to me.
A kindle is 0.36" (9.1mm) thick. It has the dimensions of a tiny 100-page book I have right here on my bookshelf. Fair enough if you only read books of that size, but even Harry Potter gets massive.
It's also much less fragile than a book. It seems indestructible. Meanwhile my backpack alone turns out to be a book-cover destroyer before we even get into lending books out.
I think most people here would agree that books are bulky and fragile, so it's weird to hear someone suggest that books have these advantages over an e-reader.
One killer feature for me is that e-readers have a backlight so I can read anywhere. E-ink lets me read in the sun. The backlight lets me read without an external source of light. It's a massive convenience. And the battery charge lasts weeks.
It's fair enough if you don't think e-readers are worthwhile to you, but it's in your best interest to figure out why it's not "a solution in search of a problem" for the people who buy them. A better angle is just to ask people why they like something and they'll happily illuminate the mystery.
I seldom use my Kindle anymore but I bought Infinite Jest a few weeks ago and immediately regretted not having dusted my old Kindle and bought the digital version instead. These large books are cumbersome to handle and carry around.
For shorter books I agree that paper is superior, I don't have to worry about damage, battery level or theft, I can easily borrow and lend them (I think you can do that with Kindle nowadays but it can't be as convenient as lending a physical object).
Part of the joke of Infinite Jest is the physical size of the thing. You'll realise if you ever manage to get more than halfway through. It's so much more than just a story...
During holidays, I typically read a book every 3/4 days, so a 2 week break means 4-5 books read, and having a kindle-like device is really helpful for me ^^
I miss conversations with people at specialized book stores. I miss spending hours looking through the aisles. It was a great way to spend an afternoon on the weekend.
I like the convenience of purchasing books online. Admittedly, though, I've lost the whole community and culture of books that small bookstores provided.
The UK had something similar called the Net Book Agreement. It wasn't written into law, rather it was between publishers and book sellers.
Eventually some of the big book retailers abandoned it then it was found to be illegal in the courts. After that the supermarkets moved in and discounted the best sellers.
The decline set in for bookshops before Amazon came along.
> meaning there's little to no interest buying books online
meaning there is no competition and prices are artificially inflated for no particular reason except some ideological one. I'm not sure it's a good case for regulating the price of books.
My observation: Japan has WAY more bookshops than France without any regulation of book prices. And they produce a LOT more books locally than France ever does.
In a society we have to consider a balance of various values, competition is a value, and having a rich ecosystem where small bookshops aren't completely obliterated by unequal competition on prices with big online stores is another one. For some reason we live in a world where increasingly the only value that has any worth is money, and any other value is belittled. And somehow, we're the ideologues.
Historically, markets for media powered by mass media and technology tended to squash diversity from the Industrial Revolution up through the late 20th century. Now, networks and markets have produced a flowering of diversity, but often with lower profit potential, though individuals are often empowered to be in business for themselves, and a few still manage superstar status.
Markets tend to do both harm and good to culture, much as trade, migration, and wars have done both harm and good. Culture will always be market driven. However, there is definitely a place for culture outside of ordinary commerce.
I'm a bit skeptical of technology in general squashing diversity. Pre the printing press you could pretty much just get the bible hand written. With the early press far more then as you didn't need type setters more again. In general it seem better tech -> lower costs -> more diverse.
I'm a bit skeptical of technology in general squashing diversity.
My understanding is that the advent of the 78 record managed to popularize the Sligo style of Irish fiddling all over the world and across Ireland. Unfortunately, it caused a lot of local fiddlers to just hang their fiddle up, resulting in a tremendous die-off of regional styles. I'm also given to understand that every holler in the mountains of West Virginia had their own style of banjo. There was once a central Pennsylvania fiddle style. All of these have largely died out. (Imagine you meet a cosplayer from 200 years in the future, and their conception of "American" is a simplified homogenized mix of all 19th and 20th century American culture of all regions. This is the degree of squashing of diversity I'm talking about.)
Pre the printing press you could pretty much just get the bible hand written. With the early press far more then as you didn't need type setters more again.
Sure, if you only have that one data point, that's what you'd think. There's a lot more to it. Prior to widespread literacy, there was a tremendous amount of oral tradition and storytelling. Back in those days, if you wanted media, the family or community had to produce it, itself. (In America in the 1800s, it used to be the norm for at least one member of every family to be capable of performing at a level that would get one paid today.) Why would you think all of those would have been written down? In fact, people who study these things know much was lost. We only have a smattering of what once was.
In general it seem better tech -> lower costs -> more diverse.
The tech we had in the Industrial Revolution up through the late 20th century wasn't as interactive and capable of gathering data, and so wasn't as good at serving the long tail. So there was a bias towards only a few things that were mass produced, and unless you did a lot of legwork, that's what you got. As technology progressed, you had easier discovery/access, more customization, and more choices. In 2019, everything is preserved, everything is available if you just casually search for it. The world wasn't always that way.
But even with fixed prices, books _are_ cheap. Pocket editions here are the price of a cigarettes pack, something a lot of people even not rich afford once or more a week. I don't think affordability is a problem.
I'm sure how it compares, but here it's $5 USD for a book you'll finish in 15-30 minutes. I find that to be _very_ expensive and I have a great job. So expensive that I've given up on buying and I always go to the library or use a subscription service.
I think that a free market would actually lead to steeply rising prices. It's a seller's market, especially for the popular titles. Occasionally you might see some price wars from publishers pushing others out of the market, but between those, the average book price is not going to go down.
Well, I disagree: Germany has similarly fixed book prices (the publisher sers the final price). But prices for textbooks are generally much more reasonable there than in the US.
I'm an atheist, but I've seen "atheists" intone their beliefs, even though there was no one around to convince, like it was a profession of dogma from a Mass. There are definitely some "atheists" around who approach it from more of a tribal affiliation perspective, not an intellectual one.
Even the most intellectually sound movement can become toxic.
The book price is fixed by the editor/publisher (I'm sorry, I'm not sure of the correct english word for "éditeur" in french), and all resellers have to sell it at this price.
To allow bookshops to do a margin, they have a specific different agreement with editors. I _think that in general they pay a yearly flat fee to editors (in the tens of thousands of euros) and then get the books at a lower price. If they sell enough copies, they end up a profit.
Ok. So does that make books expensive in France (assuming all editors / publishers are corporate capitalists looking to squeeze the maximum profit?. And what about second-hand books - do old and used books also have to be sold at a price dictated by these editors / publishers?
I travelled in the UK and in the US, and I felt that classic books were similarly priced there. In France, for books, there is quite often a cycle of "first edition with luxury components around the 20 bucks mark, followed by a pocket edition a year later around the 9 bucks mark".
For traditional french comic books, the price is France is I think higher than what I observed in the US and UK.
This is partly due to traditional culture where french publishers prefer full color editions needing more work ( where in the rest of the world we're happily mixing colors and white and black), and partly due too I suppose to a lack of incentive to lower prices when the demand is so high at the moment.
Second hand books are a total free market, and are very popular items.
> Epub and PDF are almost the same price than the hardcover versions !
That's atrocious and something I really dislike. I personally believe that ebooks should be cheaper - by subtracting the cost it takes to print the paper books (and that should be the maximum price).
Cost to print, but also cost to stock (I worked with a small publisher for years, and they had to rent a big storage facility for their stock), the cost to ship, etc.
These are marginal when selling ePub, and yet it’s still expensive in France.
Wanna know something even more stupid ?
Most of the time, you can’t buy them from out of France !
I don’t know if this is still true, but two years ago I tried to buy ePub online and couldn’t because I was not in France.
Fun fact ? I was living in the Caribbean on a French island (Guadeloupe), which is run on French laws and administration.
There is still competition in the sense that another author can write a book on a related genre. Second hand books are as common as in the US I’d say. The first Harry Potter is 8.70€ as a pocket book on Amazon.fr and I see $7.20 for paperback in the US.
The big difference is in school books, I just looked into solid mechanics, we are une the 30-70€ range in France and $80-130 range in the US (in a bad comparison, I see stuff completely irrelevant in my query result).
The trick is that the French gouvernement is not passive, it often tell industries that if they don’t change this or that, they’ll just use the law. In the end I feel it works better than in the US. In particular on book, France is under constant watch by free market entities, so they’d better reach some measure of success for the consumer or the EU will just intervene.
The goal is to preserve the French culture, it only works if French people read and write French books. If it's too expensive, people don't buy books, if it's too low, authors don't survive.
The editor of a book decides at what price it is going to be sold. Then, whether you go to your local bookshop, a huge mall or Amazon, the price is going to be the same.
The appeal of buying books online is not just the price, but the available of a larger catalogue. There is only so many titles a single physical bookshop can stock and display.
I understand that, but honestly, picking a comic among 10000 or 100000 titles isn't really a different experience for me, in both cases the number is "enough".
Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a fantastic experience for me !
> Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a fantastic experience for me !
This is a fairly rare experience for bookstores in some of the U.S. geographies I've lived in.
The shopkeepers I encounter aren't widely-read or intellectuals. They're either college students working at slightly above minimum wage to pay for school, or ex-hippies with lots of used books in their garage who figured they could make some money selling them. They have no sense of the intellectual pulse of today (they don't know what ideas are popular), don't have a good mental semantic tree of authors and their works, and worst of all, aren't readers themselves. I don't expect bookstore owners to have the omnivorous interests and breadth of Tyler Cowen, but they should at least have intellectual curiosity and a love of books.
The only exceptions are bookstores near great universities, where the owners tend to be stragglers who loved their university town so much that they stayed. They're usually former English lit, philosophy or other humanities majors who continue to read widely. You can tell a bookstore is good by the quality of their curation -- really good bookstores understand space is a premium and don't stock junk.
That said, you also need someone with a mind for business. Unfortunately this confluence of skills doesn't occur regularly so we live with what we have.
Most commonly in physical stores, one often finds that, in a multi book series of books, volumes are missing or not available, good shop managers may be trying hard to avoid that situation, but I think it is a pretty common thing. This problem can only be worse with comics, graphic novels, most of which come in serial volumes.
Another is the available of cheaper international paperback editions online.
For translated books, I do not find bookshops striving to carry as many different translations of the same work as possible, most carry only one, when some works like Homer and the Russians Greats are published in very many translations.
There's no denying that the "online" catalogue will always be larger than what a physical bookstore can have in stock.
My point is rather than in France the advantages offered by the physical bookstores (namely, its friendly employers) outweighs that, in part because the online marketplace doesn't have a price advantage. Of course, in the end it's a matter of sensitivity to various criterias, stock definitely being a relevant one !
Every bookstore I know and regularly go too has a online shop too. I can order there and go pick up my order in the store and pay in cash.
The problem with the large catalog on sites like Amazon is that it's impossible (at least for me) to sort through it if you are just browsing. If I'm in a bookstore I always find new and interesting books that I end up buying and enjoying.
> The problem with the large catalog on sites like Amazon is that it's impossible (at least for me) to sort through it if you are just browsing.
That could have something to do with Amazon's sorting/searching features, which are so bad that the results are often comical, with random unrelated results intermixed with the thing you're looking for.
Default sorting is by the "Featured" variable, which probably means 'makes most money for the seller', rather than something that actually benefits the searcher. This is a guess, it is not defined.
I think they maybe, finally, let you sort items when you're searching outside of a specific category now, but that's a relatively recent development.
It doesn't help that less than scrupulous Amazon sellers are constantly changing products around so that reviews don't line up with the product description. That widget you've found with 100 five star reviews, well, it turns out that the reviews were for a different product, but you can't tell unless you go read enough of the reviews to figure that out.
Bookkeepers can order you books as well, and they get delivered to the shop in about the same amount of time it would take to get it through online stores.
In France, the software they use is more powerful than Amazon to buy books. The database is clean, deduplicated and well maintained by professionals that know each others.
> The appeal of buying books online is not just the price, but the available of a larger catalogue.
That's part of it, but the price is a lot of it, too. I rarely go to bookstores anymore, even for books that I know I'll find there, because the books are more expensive than at Amazon.
Back then we had publishers' catalogues, and we would follow reviews in the newspaper, the weeklies and the relevant journals. Besides, Amazon's catalogue is a giant pile of shit.
In turn, those libraries create events, participate to the cultural life of their neighbourhoods, create social links.
In the end, it makes it very easy to find a book store, get good advice, create links with sellers (I spend hours talking with the shopkeeper at my comics place), and take an interest in the medium.
So it's not really a random singularity happening there, but also in part the result of a very specific books policy. And of course, the cultural legacy is also super strong !