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.
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.