[darryl]

@Steve. Thanks for your thoughtful post. It depends, of course, on the criteria you adopt for calling a law a bad law. You seem to have adopted a single criterion, Social Justice, and declared the tax concerned a good one because you feel its application is progressive. Personally I disagree even on this. Once an ereader is purchased, and there are some very cheap ones around, the price of ebooks should be, and often is, much lower, though there is of course currently no market for "used" ebooks.

Leaving this aside, I think the law is a bad one for a number of reasons. It discriminates between sales of the same content on the basis only of its form, with only an arbitrary basis for doing so. Books have often enjoyed "special snowflake" type status so far as laws and taxes are concerned. For many of us they hold a special place in our hearts, and governments are often loath to be seen as interfering with free speech and literature and the spread of ideas. I suspect that the low VAT category for books is not because of their originally paper form, but because of their content. It is effectively not accepting an ebook as being a book, which is at odds not only with the reality but also I believe with the views of most people. It threatens to distort the market in favour of the declining paper book and the publishers of such paper books. And it is effectively unenforceable.

I think it will lead to increased piracy and increased circumvention of geo-blocking. However, there is no reliable measure of either of these things. And there is further harm because even many of those who don't circumvent the law lose that little bit of further respect for the law in general.