Spanish Booksellers' Assoc. suing Amazon for not respecting the fixed price of books

[djulian]

Originally Posted by stonetools

If I were Spanish, I would take taxes that could be used to build a library or school, thanks.

The benefit to a library or a school is then you can control what people read. When you control the narrative, you control the people more easily. So, good call there.

If I were Spanish (which I'm not, though I hope to be moved there by the end of this year), I'd take the freedom to buy and read the books that I want.

If you sell 1,000 copies of the book at $2, or 40 copies at $50, you end up with the same net tax benefit to the state, but you also end up with a wider gap between the "haves" and "have-nots," as well as a lower overall positive impact with regards to the ways in which literacy benefits a group of people.

[JonathanH]

Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank

Spain, France and Germany are the 3 major European countries that has fixed book prices.

Aaaaaand that solves a puzzle that's always bugged me: why, when I list a book on Google Books, I have to PHYSICALLY TYPE IN A PRICE to enable it for sale in Spain, France, and Germany. Every other country in the world, I can just say "use my default price", upload the EPUB, and it's for sale.

(And now I just realized I should write a Chrome extension to do this for me...)

Thanks to Top100EbooksRank for solving one of those niggling "this is so STUPID" questions

[JonathanH]

Originally Posted by andreabc

In the EU, Amazon collects VAT for all physical goods according to the destination country. I'm not sure about the VAT for ebooks, (it might be the Luxembourg rate?)

From experience, ebooks are taxed at 3% in the EU and 10% in Australia. My prices assume a minimum 5% ebook tax rate in Canada. I'm pretty sure the actual Canadian tax rate varies depending on province, but after reading the first few paragraphs of explanation I got tired of the whole stupid provincial system and said "yeah, sucks to be you... "