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Originally Posted by fjtorres
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In practice, the French ebook market is sorely underdeveloped. I have tried to buy works by well-known authors from the FNAC and Amazon.fr, only to find that the
English translations are available as digital downloads, but not the originals. The shame!
France unfortunately has the dubious distinction of being the country, of all Western nations, whose population is the most indifferent to electronic reading.
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Originally Posted by Yolina
The downside of this is that obviously books can be a tad expensive, and having now been in the UK for nearly 20 years, I sometimes balk slightly at the price of French books (I do buy quite a few, be it paper or kindle format)
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Perhaps you are being hit by import duties? Books in France are ridiculously cheap compared to their equivalents in North America. I have rarely seen an édition de poche sell for more than 10 €, and the concept of the $50 hardcover first edition simply does not exist as it does in the anglophone publishing world.
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Originally Posted by BWinmill
When I was in the big city, there were plenty of independent book stores. My favourite was one that specialized in education and child development. They had a multitude of titles on every title, the authors presented ideas from different perspectives, and many of the authors presented conflicting ideas. The staff were also enormously helpful. They knew what was on the shelves, and they knew what they could get from their suppliers. (Heck, they even knew what they could not get from their suppliers.)
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Snipped for length, but good post. The tendency of mature industries to coalesce around 2 or 3 major players leads to a homogenization of taste, most often arbitrated by the lowest common denominator. I'm in Paris at the moment and the sheer diversity of bookstores is breathtaking. In the 5th arrondissement, which is admittedly the student quarter, you can find bookstores so specialized that they only deal in books on physical geography, or law, or Canadian history and culture. Even when more general in subject matter, there is often an evident care in the selection of titles that expresses a genuine enthusiasm for the medium, not just a ROI calculation. I'm disgusted when I walk into a Borders or a Chapters and the first thing I see is rows of tables covered in baubles and knick-knacks meant for home decoration and last-minute gifts.