Basic story is: Author (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Koskas, no English wikipedia page) who had other books published, could not find a publisher for his latest book, so self publishes it on Amazon's Createspace. So, this is not a book published by Amazon, which I first thought was the case.
Amazon is stamping out bookstores, so fighting against that, I think, is perfectly OK; however, pushing back against original content just because it came from Amazon sounds absurd or protectionist.
What seems to piss the bookstore syndicate, is the fact that they'll have to buy this book from Amazon if it ever wins this prize (or simply not distribute it, which was never seen); and Amazon is their arch-enemy, on a crusade to destroy all bookshops.
Yes in this case, the publishers shot themselves on the head. This is so interesting; if this book wins, it will be a major banner that Amazon empowers authors. I have to say that I can not find myself sympathetic to the publishers' argument here at all.
It's the bookstore syndicate making an argument here, not the publishers. The bookstores should be blaming the publishers for refusing to pick up this book. Instead they are blaming Amazon, and the Renaudot contest for considering this book.
Their self-interest is completely transparent, the Renaudot winner will have good sales, they don't want a book that they won't sell to win.
I read the press release in French, they are warning the Renaudot prize jury that they could be hurting the author by depriving him of having his book sold in bookstores. The argument is nonsensical.
The self-interest I can understand. The trying to project their self-interest onto others, though, is a really bad look.
"Chers jurés, vous êtes écrivains." (Dear jurors, you are writers.) Indeed they are. Why on earth would they want to punish one of their own for doing what he needed to do to get his book published, after first being stonewalled by the publishers? The SLF is asking the hand that feeds it to bite itself.
Well, they are trying to avoid biting the other hand that feeds them, the traditional publishers.
They are used to living in a world where publishers hold the power over authors. Alienating a few authors matters much less than alienating a few publishers.
The rise of self-publishing, enabled by Amazon and the likes, would be to some extent a reversal of the existing power dynamics. But asking authors to join them in opposing this reversal of power is absurd, when it is clearly to authors' advantage, as we can see with Koskas. They can't expect authors to enjoy being at the mercy of publishers.
Exactly. You pass on good writers/startups/movie pitches, you eat crow when the public turns out to like them. What’s unfair about that? If publishers use a bad filter, they have only themselves to blame when the writer finds a channel that appreciates them.
It's a shame, but unfortunately they are very successful in such public lobbying. They also forced the Cannes film festival to censor movies produces by streaming services.
In this case the writers union should step up and do some press release. But the last time I saw this in France the unions were instrumented to punish the Cannes winner Abdelatif Kechiche for essentially being a sleazy jerk, filming his naked actresses for too many unpaid hours. His next film was then punished (unions threatened legal trouble) and had to be premiered in Venice.
Most paper is made from trees grown specifically for that purpose. Avoiding paper books to save trees now makes about as much sense as eating less bread to save wheat plants.
But paper manufacturing does produce toxic waste, so e-books are probably better from that standpoint.
Amazon Createspace lets you sell both paper and digital. (In fact, to be precise, selling on Kindle is quasi-independent of selling PoD from Createspace.) I've actually published a print copy of a book through Createspace without a Kindle version because the non-DRM PDF digital version is free from my website.
Are the paper books "print on demand" or is there an initial print run like a publishing house would have? Still a good way to prevent waste if the only copies actually printed are already sold.
Publishing houses also do print on demand, as it is cheaper for smaller runs and there is less upfront investment. eg. the first 5000 copies come from a POD supplier, and if things go well they do the sums and consider doing a run of 10-20k with a traditional print setup.
On your bookshelf, chances are the 'trade paperback' sized books from the last several years came out of a POD printer (a glorified laser printer, often but not always with integrated cover and binding), and the smaller paperbacks from a traditional press. The POD books still get ordered in batches though, because it is cheaper to order 5000 copies instead of ordering a single copy 5000 times. Or lease a device from Xerox. Single copy POD is really only done through Create Space and their competitors, where customers order them directly from the printer.
No idea. I assume it's a decision that Amazon makes based on the numbers. They probably start with on-demand and, if a book is actually selling a lot of copies, they may do a larger print run at a lower unit cost. In any case, it's transparent to the author in my experience.
Amazon has probably completely automated the process. Without knowing whether the book will sell 1 or 100,000 copies they can automatically switch between print-on-demand and printing runs. They can do this because they can ship from any warehouse to your door. They can send the initial short printing run to a single warehouse and then scale up if necessary.
A bookstore relies on having enough copies available at every store, so they would need to at a minimum ship and shelve some copies to all their large branches.
> > A bookstore relies on having enough copies available at every store
> The bookstore syndicate could collaborate with a third-party, like alibris.
This is exactly my line of argument and the reason why I wrote "Why doesn't the bookstore syndicate [...]". A single bookstore clearly cannot manage this on its own. The bookstore syndicate, on the other hand, has much more options available.
Either they are selling online only like Amazon, or they need to print and ship books to hundreds of retail stores. Whether they are a bookstore or a bookstore syndicate makes no difference.
The stores can cast themselves as warehouses, print one copy and see if it sells either in-store, or online through Alibris. If yes, print 2, warehouse at 2 other stores (which can incidentally be "warehoused" on display shelves). If sold, print 4. If sold, print 8. O(n^2) up to some point then switch to linear or O(log(n)) growth. Eventually, your last run will print.
Except, the value Uber provides is entirely in being cheaper than the competition.
There have been apps to book taxi rides in Germany for years, some of them even existed as early as 2007 and allowed booking the ride online and paying online ahrad of time.
Yet, the only reason Uber had an advantage while it was operating in Germany was the massivr ad budget they had due to taking higher fees from drivers, and their cheaper prices due to not paying for insurances or ensuring that the drivers actually had the correct drivers licenses.
The value Uber provides to me is a ride within minutes of the request. Taxis in London (which have their own apps like Gett and MyTaxi) can't match that from my experience.
Uber also provides me with a way to claim money back should any problems arise directly from the app, where as the process for a taxi is much more time-consuming.
That is the one big question, isn't it? Just image that book stores collaborate and find a third party to do the printing-on-demand? It is not always Amazon who's doing this, so these printers will work for everyone else. All you need is a webshop and an interface to said printing company. Logistics would than be handled by say FedEx or DHL, same as for Amazon.
But that would mean to change the way they run their business, so it is easier to fight change for them and hope for the best.
PoD also makes life for publishers a lot harder. Traditionally they had to filter books they thought would sell well to justify the costs for marketing, printing, distribution etc. Now, PoD allows to publish basically everything with close to zero marginal cost, even for paper books. And THAT goes against the very core of publishers culture as gate keepers.
There are even, at least in Germany, companies specialized already in media distribution and logistics. So they would be the first candidates oneight expect to jump into the PoD market. For some reason they didn't.
This is incorrect. Now that the book has won a prestigious prize, normal publishers will likely offer to publish the book the normal way, and so these bookstores will be able to stock the book in the normal way.
If the author's assertion is true, and this novel, unlike his others, was passed over due to antisemitism, then those publishers likely still won't publish.
Additionally, if the author believes that, why should he give them a cut now?
The book was about the experience of jews, not Israel.
If someone's anti-Israel attitude results in them discarding the experiences of people who are merely jewish, then there isn't much difference between that and being antisemitic.
It hasn't won anything yet, it's only listed, the prize winner will be announced next month. Whether or not it will find a publisher on short notice is dubious, there's likely still editing work to do to bring to the level acceptable by many publishers. It might find a distributor though.
> Amazon is stamping out bookstores, so fighting against that, I think, is perfectly OK
Actually they've only stamped out the mega chain book stores. Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, Borders, Books-A-Million.
After a bad run, independent book stores have been thriving for the past decade.
"But not only did the independents refuse to die, they rebounded and even experienced a growth spurt. In 2018, the ABA has 1,835 members operating 2,470 locations — a 31 percent increase in companies and a 49.6 percent increase in the number of physical stores in just nine years."
"Revenues from hardcover book sales were $5.92 billion in 2017, an increase of 10.7 percent in four years, according to the Association of American Publishers. During the same period, eBook revenues declined by 36 percent to $2.08 billion last year."
The recovery has been written about a lot and is broad-based across the US -
This is interesting to me. Mostly because I no longer purchase physical books and am actively working on getting rid of the thousands of physical books in my house (I don't want to ever move them again). I've gone to pure digital books. Of course my surprise that physical bookstores are rebounding is just me projecting my own experience onto everyone else.
I went digital for a while, but switched back to print.
What I found was, ebooks aren't that much less expensive. Possibly more expensive, in that I don't believe the amount of money I have spent on e-readers, amortized over all the ebooks I have bought, works out to a lower price than what I'd have spent on print copies of the same set of books.
And, even if I dis save some money, the fact remains that I just don't enjoy the e-reader experience as much. I love browsing books at a physical bookstore, I love reading the staff recommendation cards, looking at what the book clubs are reading, etc. I love the physical experience of turning the page, I love how much crisper and more readable the paper is, I love the smell of the paper, etc.
The only bit I hated was how much space the books take up, and how annoying they are to deal with when I'm moving. And at some point I hit on the solution to that problem: Pass 'em on. By the time I get to the last page of a book, I already know if there's a good chance I'll want to read it again. If there isn't, why hold on to it? That one realization reduced the size of my book collection by maybe 90%. Thanks to the magic of used bookstores, I was even able to turn them into more books I hadn't read yet.
I've still got the e-reader, but nowadays it's mostly fed by Humble Bundles.
Another win for physical books, at least for me, is that I generally find vague searching to be faster in physical books.
By vague searching I mean searching for something where I don't remember enough exact phrases or low frequency words from it to use an electronic search.
With a physical book I often remember the approximate physical location within the book of what I'm looking for, and often nearby things to further help with the search. For instance, I might remember that the equation I'm trying to find was on a left hand page around 40% into the book, with the right hand page having a plot of some function that was growing logarithmically. I can then quickly flip through the book and find it.
I don't get that physical sense of location within the book when reading e-book.
> What I found was, ebooks aren't that much less expensive.
Ebooks are that less expensive, because they are mostly free now: ebook filesharing communities like LibGen (part of the Sci-Hub universe) have had 95% of what I want to read. I own a Kindle and read voraciously, but I have never had to actually pay for an ebook. With cost savings like that, it is hard to go back to paper except for a very few genres (such as poetry, for me at least) where the physical artifact is an important part of the experience.
> Thanks to the magic of used bookstores, I was even able to turn them into more books I hadn't read yet.
For me, that's the primary reason ebooks don't appeal to me: they always cost much more, despite the fact that I don't mind reading on devices I already own (e.g. smartphone). I almost never buy new, never buy hardback, and I (re-)sell on the used market frequently enough that the average net cost of a physical book is significantly lower.
I think it's in part due to publishers artificially inflating print prices verses ebooks. I frequently find books on Amazon where the Kindle ebook is more expensive than the paperback.
But like you I have also gotten rid of almost all my print books, although I bought one from a bookstore yesterday. Impulse buy.
I have been doing the same. I have moved to the other side of the country and then to another continent, books are the most cumbersome non furniture objects to move.
However, while I like some aspects of digital like the ability to leave synchronized notes, synced progress between terminals, powerful search, ..
I also really miss the feeling of paper. Not to mention that it looks like we are either still missing a good digital book format or publishers are just doing an half assed job with the existing ones but anything not alphanumerical (notes, graphs, pictures, etc) almost always look awful on digital versions.
Heck, even the cover is usually fairly low res.
At least part of the problem is that digital, e.g. Kindle, format books are produced/formatted for the least-common-denominator like a basic epaper Kindle. That's fine for basically text. Sucks for graphically rich content which would be a lot more effort to produce in any case.
The alternative is to produce content aimed at 10" iPad/Android and above and leave out other users.
I know it is a lot more work, but we have been able to do content that scales for a while.
First on desktop then on mobile. Sure, we still don't have the perfect tools to do this (looking at you, all the design tools that only give 'pixel perfect' previews when we need scalable ones) but this is in an acceptable state.
Could we do the same for books ?
Vectorial assets for schemas, high quality cover and illustrations, Scaling instructions.
Sure, some rare tricks, like having a blank page in the middle of the book for a dramatic effect, or having a specific word after the page turn will be lost. But for 99% of the usecases, I believe we can do much better.
This only works with (relatively) newer books that have digital versions. I have a few books that are only available as physical copies, I love them and don't want to give them up.
It's a bit strange though, paradoxical even. Someone publishes a book independently, because posh french publishers didn't think the book would sell. Now that Amazon is involved and being the only way to obtain the book the bookstore owners refuse to... what exactly? Acknowledge it as a book they cannot put on a shelf? But, no! It's not about the book anymore! It's all about defending bookstore owners from Amazon and publishers who refuse to publish books.
Also, the issue that it's available exclusively via Amazon is mind-boggling to me. Perhaps it's one of Amazon's exploitative terms and conditions? Or perhaps the author's vindictive reaction?
The only person that did everything right in this whole mess is the author who self-published a good book. Everyone else has lost their minds.
The bookstore syndicate's press release is addressed to the Renaudot Prize jury. They are explicitly trying to convince the jury to not vote for Koskas' book, not because of its literary merits (or lack thereof), but just because it is published by Amazon.
After Koskas was passed over by publishers and so took the reasonable step of self-publishing, the bookstores are now trying to throw him under the bus, blatantly in the pursuit of their own self-interest, because the Renaudot Prize winner will likely sell well, so they don't want a book they can't sell to win.
What is interesting is that the publishers are some kind of old school obstacle, Amazon comes on a white horse with the promise of avoiding any obstacle, then they corner the market and become the obstacle themselves. Somehow there is no way out, there is always some kind of Lord deciding for the plebeians, they always come as the new meritocracy, and they always end up creating a caste system.
Publishing is an incredibly open field really. Anyone can publish anything with vanity presses, printing, and others. You can find any sort of fringe for bizarre and/or abhorrent publisher out there and make your own if needed. If you want to accuse say the Canadian Green Party of secretly being space lobsters from Mercury out to eat our pancreases nobody can stop you and you might find a following from people wondering what on earth you are talking about. Being big just helps with margin per book and marketing. Not trivial but they aren't the final obstacle.
I don't know if it is different in Europe, but books published by Create Space US are available for order world wide through the same distribution channels as book stores use for all their other stock. IIRC all that is needed is a real ISBN number and a fee to get listed, which IIRC was together <$50. If book stores don't stock it then it is by choice.
Warning: raw personal opinion ahead. You're welcome to downvote, but I'd prefer it if you left a response so I can learn something.
Europe in general but France in particular seems completely unprepared for the changes technology and the web are still rolling out. The market seems to me to be a morass of entrenched, sclerotic industries that grew fat after decades of governmental protection. Naturally, in many cases the response is simple: more governmental protection.
As dominant as Amazon it, at least in the US is has a nascent rival in Walmart, a massive retail chain that's frantically piling onto the internet to try to catch up. The American system has produced a challenger to Amazon's mega-consolidation by seeing another champion of mega-consolidation attempt to pivot its business. Where is France's answer to Amazon? Does France not have large national retail chains? Why are we not seeing companies to buying one another up in order to form like Voltron against a large threat like Amazon?
My (admittedly uninformed) impression is: because the competitive and regulatory environment doesn't seem allow for it. Laws on hiring and firing workers. Laws limiting discounts on books. Laws governing corporate takeovers. Why else would industries whose very existence depends on cushy regulatory favors have no way of dealing with tech giants besides more regulatory favors (Article 13, Article 11, Right to be Forgotten, the entire charade of fines for "anti-competitive behavior")?
Instead of ripping off the bandaid and establishing a new and competitive economy by deregulating, taking the hit, and nurturing a new generation of cutthroat competition, France and the EU has protected its weakest and least-competitive industries, to the detriment of its people and the world at large.
Well we have Carrefour (second largest retail store chain after Walmart).
I understand your position from an American point of view but I don't agree with it. What you see as unnecessary regulation we see as the right way of governing, and what you see as protecting dying industries we see as preserving a way of life.
Since 1981 (or so) the price of books has been fixed by law. Nobody can sell them lower than that price. If you walk through Paris (or most cities) you'll see a number of small library shops that contribute to local economy and culture. I find that very nice!
Other retail industries have not been so lucky. Many smaller towns (10-50k inhabitants) have seen their city centers die out because of large outlets opening outside of town, and because of Amazon. I guess you could the say that the free market has decided what was the future. But these cities have become dead towns, people have moved to the suburbs, contributing to sprawl and car pollution. Social life has been reduced, and a recent study showed that the far right/protest vote was higher there. Today the political opinion is starting to shift and there's talk of more regulation to try and preserve smaller cities.
Anyway, there's a lot more that could be said in this eternal debate between the "American" and "European" point of view. But I mean we're not Soviet Russia. We may not have Facebook (I can live with that) or Apple (that would be nicer), but regulations are only part of the issue. And we're not clinging to some antiquated world view, we're just trying to make sure change doesn't crush people too fast.
But the French public chose to shop at the large outlets. But there are some that find it ok to restrict freedom to essentially subsidize a “way of life” that they value — despite other people not also valuing it as much (otherwise, why would they shop at Auchan?)
The individual should be trusted to enjoy their own way of life without government forcing people into some idealized way of life devised by politicians who have tax-payer funded hairdressers making €11,000 per month as Hollande did.
Meanwhile a typical French person has to deal with crazy-expensive taxes and ridiculous protectionism that, for example, prohibits buying aspirin at a supermarket. Or even a supermarket that stays open past 9pm. Allowing people to buy aspirin at a supermarket isn’t going to “crush people too fast.” Except maybe pharmacists. But solving my headache is worth more to me than saving a pharmacist’s “way of life.” Pharmacies do just fine in the US despite not having a monopoly on over-the-counter medicine. But, attempt to change the law, which rational French have suggested, and pharmacists go on a national strike.
There is a reason the French economy is stagnant — and stagnation crushes a country far more profoundly than innovation or market liberalization.
French wine is the “best in the world,” (according to the French,) yet they have high tariffs on US wines to “protect” an industry they claim is the best? French winemakers hijack Spanish trucks and dump thousands of liters of wine into the streets to protest. And the French public allows these policies to continue — despite, ironically being fully in control of the wine they purchase at the supermarket. It’s a great illustration of people wanting to “preserve” a way of life — until it inconveniences them. Market liberalization doesn’t change anyone’s way of life unless they want it too. People could still avoid shopping on Sundays, buy only French wine and reject all things foreign. However, that isn’t what the public wants: they want freedom to live “their” way of life, not some idealized way of life imposed upon them. French people aren’t characters in a movie and they deserve the freedom to buy what they want, when they want and from whom they want. They deserve the freedom to engage in commerce in a way that optimizes for their needs. Certainly have some common sense regulation such as health and safety, but what business is it of the government if I want to buy aspirin at a fucking supermarket at 10:30pm and some supermarket is willing to sell it to me? If such freedom would “crush” people, then let the. Be crushed. I have a headache and don’t have time the desire or inclination to hunt around the countryside for the government-designated overnight pharmacy just so I can wake up a reluctant pharmacist to buy aspirin or whatever I need.
My point is that France is being crushed already — not from liberalization but from stagnation. Liberté sure — as long as it doesn’t piss off the pharmacists or farmers
In many cases, self-optimization by individuals is nefast in a socio-economic environment that actively seeks out concentrating benefits and externalizing detriments.
Let's take cars as an example. For every 'individual' owning a car is better than not owning a car. After all, whether you own a car or not, you live in the same pollution and discomfort caused by everyone else having cars. So you might as well part-take in the benefits rather than only suffer the downsides.
HN readers are a smart analytical crowd so they are not afraid of models and numbers. Here goes:
Take a toy world with 1000 'people'.
In this toy world, you get 500 'enjoyment' points from owning a car, a huge benefit, and you get -1 'enjoyment' points from someone else owning a car, a small detriment. It is clear that when nobody would own a car, the aggregate sum of all 'enjoyment' points would be 0. Nobody cares about the aggregate as each 'rational' consumer is trying to optimize their own benefit.
For each and everyone, the 'optimal' decision is to get a car, even if they might notice at first the small negative impacts, as it immediately ups their 'enjoyment' by a serious amount. Sure, some other people buying cars brought my enjoyment to a small negative number, but getting one myself immediately offsets that.
It is not until fairly late in this cycle, in this model when the number of cars exceeds 500, that the individual perception that the world was better off without cars altogether might set in. However, even when this occurs, the 'rational' decision for every consumer is still to buy/own a car. If everyone has a car, then everyone's enjoyment sits at an abysmal -500, yet getting rid of your own car immediately brings you enjoyment down to -999.
These systemic 'race-to-the-bottom' scenarios exist in many forms in the real world, and are the underlying mechanic in many of the most detrimental situations we find ourselves in, environmentally, but also socioeconomically.
They can only be curbed by collective restriction on 'freedoms', something that is blasphemy to many, I know, and nearly impossible to achieve through our current political organization.
There are no easy answers to this. However, every time you hear someone utter things like 'vote with your wallet' when you object to the negative externalities something has , know that they are promoting a system that inherently leads to disaster.
For the wine part, I don't know if you are aware but foreign wine still have a very bad reputation in France, foreign wine account for 5% of the total sales in France, so you have 5% for Spain + Italy + Portugal + the new world all together, that's pretty much nothing. The only common foreign wine I've ever seen is maybe Porto, that's the only exception and probably a good part of these 5%. They are an absolute niche and a tough sell even without any regulation. I know a lot of people who would not trust foreign wine at all. Additionally, France has not adopted the English way to categorise wine and still uses the French way, which does not help to sell foreign wines there.
And for the pharmacists, I'm living now in Asia and I appreciate the French system even more because at least in France you can trust pharmacists without any doubt.
This reflects my experience with France (living just next to it, spending most weekends there). It is truly a beautiful country, but system and mentality is something I will never ever want to live in.
They don't have democracy, they have anarchy - when any industry decided it wants more money, they take rest of the country as a hostage and they don't give a fraction of a fck about consequences to others lives (trains, airlines, taxi drivers, farmers, anybody). In other couturiers those people at one point would go to jail. You want to fix a broken heater in an apartment? Well it took 1.5 years, ping pong excuses, with ridiculously high costs. Trade jobs are ridiculously protected, to the point where there is no competition and end user pays eye-watering sums for mediocre services. French colleagues, patriots they may be, prefer much more hiring Portugese or east European workers to french ones. And its not only about prices, quality and motivation is worlds apart.
I mean, many young still think communism is some ideal to strive for, that tells you enough how good spirited but desperately naive and out of touch with real world this country is. This gap is going to widen much more before it will get better. To think they want to create startup hubs is a joke, and a very bad one. I mean, even Macron has some pretty sour statements about how messed up and unfixable French state and mentality is. And he has nothing to win to publicly state those things, only to lose.
It's a typical place which has huge potential, due to its location, beauty and human 'capital' (highly educated masses), but never will come even close to realizing this potential for many reasons. The system is broken, everybody is doing whatever they want and fck the rest, rules and law are a joke to ignore and resist, corruption is very high (and like ie marital cheating, is semi-accepted as 'a french way').
The only sane discussion about these with a french person can be if that person has lived outside France for some time. Otherwise its always 'France is the best country in the world, end of discussion'.
You think these are some outsider's sour opinions? No they come mostly from my french colleagues.
> Since 1981 (or so) the price of books has been fixed by law. Nobody can sell them lower than that price. If you walk through Paris (or most cities) you'll see a number of small library shops that contribute to local economy and culture. I find that very nice!
How many times have you bought something in one of those shop this year?
I see lot of people trying to defend the postcard way of life. Even if people living there don't want to be part of the postcard and want to enjoy modern things. Like cheap books so you can read a lot for not too much. There's only one kind of shops offering the postcard dream for cheap concerning books: used book stores. You can enjoy trying to find some specific book but you usually end with a dozen books you never heard of and can discover new authors.
I've bought a few books in a physical store... well, last year at least. My go-to place to buy books is online but not Amazon: booklooker.de has a very nice no-nonsense user interface to buy used (and new, but I prefer used) books from... mostly small bookstores.
By the way, small bookstores in Germany have incredibly good logistics and had them even before Amazon: Order a book until 15:00-18:00 (not sure / may also depend on location) and it's there for pickup next morning. Faster and more reliable than Amazon. Whether it's more or less convenient than Amazon depends.
In France I'd buy online at Carrefour and cdiscount. (I'd do that a lot, because businesses in France tend to close on Sundays.) Online marketplaces do exist and in addition to those two they have smaller, niche marketplaces for specific markets such as electronics, biking or outdoor sport equipment, etc.
People in France do not shop (online shopping included) as much as Americans. They have less access to credit and less credit card debt. We don't hear about the French Amazons because, in part, the market, which is a smaller market that spends less, doesn't support Amazon-sized things by itself. (The EU market is a bigger fish, and Carrefour in particular has spread across Europe and to Asia and Africa... it really is "Walmart for the rest of the world".)
Anyway, assuming you have never lived in France or any EU country for any length of time, you'll have to take me at my word that the locals don't wish they lived in a deregulated market where they, too, could work 5 part-time jobs for less than minimum wage.
(French wine and cheese are, in my personal opinion, not actually better than some wines and cheeses to be found in America. However, I greatly appreciated that their kooky laws on acceptability of other countries' wines and cheeses meant that I could get 100g of any of about 50 cheeses for $4, something impossible most supermarkets in the US -- Walmart if you're reading... cheap Brie please, thank you. As a consumer of cheese, I found French laws more pro-consumer. As a consumer of flat screen TVs, there is no beating America, although those of your states that still do sales tax need to get on with the program.)
Somewhat related. I'm a huge bookworm. I think there is a healthier, in the sense of promoting newer authors, leaving less decisions in the hands of gatekeepers, etc book industry on your/our side of the Atlantic. But I kind of miss the fixed price for paperbacks France has (used to have, I don't remember). I used to buy books all the time there, whereas here, I can't really afford that too much and just go to the library.
> the competitive and regulatory environment doesn't seem allow for it. Laws on hiring and firing workers[...]
Well that's the philosophical standpoint. To put it bluntly (and oversimplifying just for the sake of getting my point across) do we want a society where economy serves the well-being of people or is the economy is the end goal and or we willing to crush the workers for it? Lately, inequalities in wealth distribution and quality of life are intensifying in developed countries.
Europeans would typically object to tax avoidance and sidestepping labour regulations; Amazon should compete equally with the existing businesses. If like to see much more done by the EU and national governments to close loopholes.
Economic or business efficiency is also not the only goal of Europe.
There seems to be some philosophical disagreement here: what obligation is there beyond the letter of the law? If the tax code and labor regulations permit a legal maneuver, and that something is generally accepted as being legal, how is taking advantage of that maneuver sidestepping regulation?
In this context being upset at an organization for "tax avoidance and sidestepping labour regulations" seems to me to be about as rational as being upset at water for flowing downhill. What's more, there's nothing inherent to these loopholes that favors American companies, and yet it's almost universally American companies that are being targeted for this regulatory mob justice.
I call sour grapes and attempt to reformulate my original point: American companies, the most vigorous of which have emerged victorious from the survival-of-the-fittest meat grinder of the American business environment, have set their sights on the comparatively sclerotic European continent, and are on a tear. To which the European system responds not by encouraging competition, thereby strengthening its own offerings in the long run, but by backdoor regulatory protectionism.
I'm sure it's satisfying in the short term to siphon off a fine here and a tax there from these companies, but they're just going to keep coming. Either the EU steps up its approach to competition or it drowns in American tech prowess.
> There seems to be some philosophical disagreement here: what obligation is there beyond the letter of the law?
Spoken like a true sociopath. The world doesn't exist purely for each and everyone to scheme their way through, the world is generally a much better place if everyone works to improve the world instead of their own standing in it. Here is where the disagreement comes from (very broadly speaking): Americans hold the utilitarian point of view that if everyone chases their personal goals the world will improve, while Europeans think the world will improve if everyone works towards common goals. In the latter worldview, the law isn't the only boundary to observe, it's merely the option of last resort.
Here's where the utilitarian approach falls flat: it only works if everyone is of comparable power. Having one or two mega-corporations that have more power than entire countries is not going to produce a universally better society.
> I'm sure it's satisfying in the short term to siphon off a fine here and a tax there from these companies
I'm sure it's equally satisfying for American companies to siphon off European profits to overseas territories while giving nothing in return.
The entire point is that having mega-corporations like Amazon or Walmart is not the goal, their very existence should be prevented.
The entire point is that profit at all costs, the very system you defend when you describe it like a natural law, is a pure dystopia, and shouldn't exist.
Having many small, independent stores is desirable not even just because of competition, but also to provide an environment that allows a certain kind of society to exist in the first place.
A society where american mega-corporations are dominating while avoiding taxes kills competition because smaller competitors don't have the same advantages. You end up with huge stores at the edge of town, as walmart often does in the US, and as result destroy walkability and accessibility of the entire urban environment.
I live in a city in Germany where exactly that is happening. I'm now 22, in my childhood we had dozens of stores nearby. Two small supermarkets, a drug store, two pharmacies, three bakeries, a post office.
Nowadays out of all these, one pharmacy and one bakery are left.
The next supermarket is 2km away, and everyone drives there.
Instead of parents sending children to go by foot and buy that loter of milk they forgot, they drive every time.
As result, roads got more congested and had to be widened. Sidewalks were the first to be removed or made smaller to give way for more lanes. Also, walking to the stores you'd always meet other people, and walk together and talk.
In 18 years, this district went from being a walkable place with a healthy social environment to a suburban hellhole, just because larger chains built ever larger supermarkets and killed the small competition.
I'm moving to a different city in a few months, one where this hasn't happened yet, where everyone, child or adult, can still reach everything by foot, and where the streets are still calm enough that children can walk on the wide sidewalks without much risk. A place where there are still many smaller stores, each selling different stuff, giving together much more choice than the big retailers do.
How did those small stores get “killed?” Who’s fault is that? The town voted to kill those stores when they stopped buying from those stores. Nobody forces you to go to a large store. And, if the public actually wants cheaper products, how do you have any right to oppose them optimizing for their own situation? That’s democracy in action: people vote with their wallets. If they cared about their kids buying a liter of milk, they’d have their kids still buying those liters of milk. Big stores didn’t put the small stores out of business — the people of your perfect little town did by exercising freedom. And you seem to be arguing against freedom to assuage your selfish nostalgia? Perhaps vote for lower taxes so people could afford to shop in overpriced small shops? Perhaps vote to eliminate all tariffs so that consumer products could be cheaper? Perhaps vote for fewer regulations so small shops wouldn’t be crushed by taxes and Byzantine labor laws. Try starting a small shop in France and see how hard it is to even open the doors, let alone make a profit. But the same people that lament the death of the small shop have no trouble voting for leftist politicians that create the very regulatory environment that makes those small shops unprofitable.
- Some people may relate democracy more to a vote-with-ballots activity (among others aspects of democracy of course), more than the "vote with your wallet" thing you describe. If a town both votes for big shops with its wallet and for small shops with its ballot, which option has it voted for?
- Some people may think that the outcome of indoviduals optimizing their own situation is often, but not always socially optimal. That's why for instance taxes are mandatory and not voluntary - otherwise no or few optimizing individuals would pay. Usually, the story is that central small shops have large positive externalities (sustaining what the comment you replied to call a "certain kind of society") and suburban malls have large negative externalities (congestion, decreased walkabikity for everyone else). Those exertanilities are not taken into account when people optimize their situation, leading to a suboptimal market equilibrium.
> A society where american mega-corporations are dominating while avoiding taxes kills competition because smaller competitors don't have the same advantages.
Here is an idea: remove the taxes so everyone is on an even playing field.
One of the worst example of this is in France is the crédit recherche, meant to help R&D. But you need people who know the system to get this money so who get it? Huge CAC40 companies like Orange. The small companies? They pay the taxes for this so the bigger ones can enjoy their money.
The beauty of digital "self" publishing is that there are no labor regulations for Amazon to be side stepping. It's likely that the Amazon engineers and VPs that made self publishing possible are compensated more highly than their EU / French counterparts.
Now, maybe a Kindle isn't manufactured and shipped up to EU/French regulations or norms; but that isn't even directly involved; and I'd suggest that some of the traditional publishers do similar side steppings when sourcing or delivering hard copies. (And in the case of paper vs digital, there is simply much more labor to sidestep - if for instance, we assume 50% of Amazon's sales will be to existing Kindle owners)
> Europe in general but France in particular seems completely unprepared for the changes
No, that's not really true, but even so, sluggishness as opposed to wild progress is not a bad thing, actually.
You are missing the point. The traditional publishers didn't want to publish the book although it was good. This is a rhetorical: why? The consequences were: instead of following the traditional approach the author turned to other means of making the book available to the public. That's it.
The main problem I see isn't the speed of adopting changes as that can be a bit guesswork as to what will stick around as opposed to being a flash in the pan. It is that the cartels are wildly entitled and expect the hammer to be brought down on any who dare to enter their domain as a competitor. That doesn't have the best track record for success to put it mildly.
European Farmers have derailed a trade bill not because of the bad copyright clauses or the downright stupid corporate sovereignty portions that allowed for suing for lost profits /regardless of circumstances/ of legislation but because they wouldn't pass labeling laws that expected others who had produced Parmesan cheese and champagne wine for centuries to allow them to be the only ones to provide it to the world. There were many good reasons to oppose the bill yet the stupid one won out.
i don't get it. how is amazon threatening the bookshops' livelihood when it was the traditional publishers who didn't pick up the book? shouldn't bookshop owners be upset that publishers aren't able to scale properly?
Self-publishing isn't really an issue here. The fact that it's self-published (through Amazon services) and is available exclusively at Amazon is what pisses off this syndicate.
Which I find weird because they'd expect the author to handle shipment to the 3000+ bookshops all by himself ? I've heard some self-published authors do that, but this is madness.
Further: the Amazon 'CreateSpace' self-publishing contract is apparently non-exclusive.
If any traditional publisher wanted to offer an edition of this book – which is now award-nominated! – they could make the author an offer.
These bookshops thus have a sort of 'Stockholm Syndrome', identifying with the traditional publishers on whom they have become overly-dependent, and whose disinterest in this apparently-meritorious book has created the problem for the bookshops.
right. i understand why booksellers would be upset that they aren't able to stock a bestselling book. but i don't understand why they're mad at amazon and not at publishers for not working with the author.
> France is highly supportive of its independent booksellers: it has fixed book prices, and caps discounts at 5%, passing a bill in 2013 to stop retailers such as Amazon from combining the 5% discount with free delivery.
It's entirely possible for a bookshop to sell a book self-published through CreateSpace : the author can purchase larger prints from CreateSpace (at a lower price than the Amazon list price) and have them sent to the bookshop. But what happens to unsold inventory ?
The traditional publisher takes almost all the financial risks : they pay for editing, type-setting, marketing and for the initial printing run of the book, without any guarantee that sales will cover the investment. Bookshops do buy the books, but they are allowed to return unsold inventory after a while, and the publisher takes the loss.
With a self-published author, who shoulders the risk of printing a copy and delivering it to bookshop shelves ? For CreateSpace in France, that's 15€-ish. The author can't, the bookshops won't, and the traditional investor (the publisher) is out of the equation.
An Amazon-published book, winning a prize, pisses the "traditional book industry"
A Netflix-produced movie, winning a prize, pisses the "traditional movie industry"
In both case, these are syptoms of tectonic shifts in the way media, entertainment and art are produced and consumed. Both fights look like rearguard actions, although I am much more sympathetic to the bookstore fight (they are not the one who chose not to publish the book)
The book itself is quite entertaining, but the layout... Gosh, I hope the author gets a professional to do the layout of the next book, it's really annoying.
A few things strike me about France's 'cultural preservation' type approach - firstly, in preventing change a decision is being made that a period in time represented the high water mark for France's development, and that change from that point can only be negative; given that before this period change was allowed, and that indeed it was change that led to the perceived high point, isn't it strange to now say: 'no more change, change is bad!'.
Secondly, who gets to determine what industries/culture gets preserved, and what process is used? I'd be surprised to find out there is any kind of consistent process behind this.
Thirdly, aren't these booksellers supposed to be businessmen after all?! Perhaps if they are so attached to a goverment-protected role involving culture they would be better off in a library or museum.
Partly the author's fault. He could publish his book simultaneously through smashwords (the only caveat is you have to make sure other distribution channels don't undercut Amazon's price... that's an important part of Amazon's rules), to avoid Amazon being the sole source of the book.
Fault? He is getting free publicity to the point he is even on the front page of HN (not that he care about this specifically). Show me the last time this happened with a French book up for a prize.
This is not exactly true. Amazon has removed books from its publishing platform based on their content, and even makes pseudo-literary judgements by forbidding "placeholder" or "dummy" text.
Neither of those is a matter of literary opinion. A book full of Markov-chain gibberish created to receive KDP revenue, or to serve in a money laundering scheme, is not a work of literature -- it's an instrument of fraud. Removing these books is simply a (entirely reasonable) business decision.
I'm not sure what you're thinking of in particular when you mention books removed "based on their content", but I can think of any number of scenarios where this is, again, a perfectly reasonable decision.
We might not be seeing major issues now, but I think it would be fairly easy to foresee one or two major publishing cartels controlling all publications as things continue to consolidate with internet powerhouses. Sounds absolutely ripe for censorship concerns.
I'm also thinking that a couple of the Oulipo works (perhaps some of those by François Le Lionnais?) had randomly generated contents -- within schemata or grammars created by the authors, of course.
But I guess this is the exception rather than the rule.
Basic story is: Author (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Koskas, no English wikipedia page) who had other books published, could not find a publisher for his latest book, so self publishes it on Amazon's Createspace. So, this is not a book published by Amazon, which I first thought was the case.
Is this any different from, say, giving an Oscar to a movie that Netflix produced and only available (at least initially) through it? See here for a discussion on precisely this question: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/netflix-the-osc...
Amazon is stamping out bookstores, so fighting against that, I think, is perfectly OK; however, pushing back against original content just because it came from Amazon sounds absurd or protectionist.