It's a long standing law here in France that books cannot be discounted by more than 5%. Amazon kind of gets around this by offering free shipping on book purchases - and this often makes the price competitive with the more deeply discounted UK site when you take the shipping costs into account. I've also noticed that amazon.fr carries older (sometimes out of print) books in their English books section. I suspect they get the remainders from the US and UK operations. (Great for finding manuals for a prior version of some software program!)
There's also the factor that in much of Europe books are subject to a lower VAT rate (it's only 5.5% in France vs. 19.6% on most other stuff). A holdover from the days when the government controlled all forms of communication - from newspapers to telephone, telegraph and the post office. However, e-books are taxed as "electronic files" or some such nonsense and so are subject to the full VAT rate.
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