7 ms·

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 boo

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). [0] https://www.sne.fr/app/uploads/2017/11/Intervention-Catherine-Blache_prix-unique-du-livre_mars-2015.pdf https://www.sne.fr/app/uploads/2017/11/Intervention-Catherin...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pier25 5y ago
> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now. So in the end the seller with the best service will win.
- themitigating 5y ago
  Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....
  - pier25 5y ago
    All these fall into "having the best service" IMO.
  - wibagusto 5y ago
    Sure they can sell more books if open longer, have more resources, etc. But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.
    - claaams 5y ago
      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.
      - mitigating 5y ago
        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.
        wibagusto 5y ago
        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.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    Well, no free shipping anymore ...
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  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.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    > It just removes the price out of the equation. I too welcome our post-scarcity future :)
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      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.
      - refurb 5y ago
        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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  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?
  - kataklasm 5y ago
    That's how it is in my local store, no shipping costs if you pick it up at their's.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > 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 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?
option 5y ago
so the consumer loses here
- hulitu 5y ago
  No, amazon loses here. They cannot dump the market with prime anymore.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  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.
- manmal 5y ago
  I wonder whether the customer really wins, if, eventually, one or two companies control handle all book sales. Global vs local optimum situation.
- flexie 5y ago
  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.
  - csee 5y ago
    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.
74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
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.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Even a damaged book can't be sold at a discount (only for newly sold).
908B64B197 5y ago
> 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pier25 5y ago

> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now. So in the end the seller with the best service will win.

themitigating 5y ago
Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....
- pier25 5y ago
  All these fall into "having the best service" IMO.
- wibagusto 5y ago
  Sure they can sell more books if open longer, have more resources, etc. But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.
  - claaams 5y ago
    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.
    - mitigating 5y ago
      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.
      - wibagusto 5y ago
        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.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Well, no free shipping anymore ...
makeitdouble 5y ago
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.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  > It just removes the price out of the equation. I too welcome our post-scarcity future :)
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    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.
    - refurb 5y ago
      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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
black_puppydog 5y ago
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?
- kataklasm 5y ago
  That's how it is in my local store, no shipping costs if you pick it up at their's.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > 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 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?

option 5y ago

so the consumer loses here

hulitu 5y ago
No, amazon loses here. They cannot dump the market with prime anymore.
makeitdouble 5y ago
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.
manmal 5y ago
I wonder whether the customer really wins, if, eventually, one or two companies control handle all book sales. Global vs local optimum situation.
flexie 5y ago
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.
- csee 5y ago
  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.

74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago

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.

sofixa 5y ago
Even a damaged book can't be sold at a discount (only for newly sold).

908B64B197 5y ago

> 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.