" any eBook sold in France must cost the same as its paper versions"

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Hmmm.......just goes to show.........

politicians are the same all over the world.

Ignorant.

You mean easily bought by entertainment industries.

[Logseman]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The argument in favour of fixed pricing for books (an argument which I don't personally support, but I accept that it has a certain validity) is that the result of a free market in book pricing is the closure of small independent bookshops and, indeed, the British experience would seem to bear out the truth of that. In the days of the Net Book Agreement (the British fixed-price book arrangement) every town had its small bookshops. Within a few years of its abolition, they'd practically all gone. These days supermarkets sell cheap bestsellers, and there's only one bookseller still left - Waterstones, who have a shop in almost every town. Independent booksellers (other than specialist shops) are practically an extinct species. It could well be argued that this is too high a price to pay for the privilege of being able to buy cheap bestsellers along with your groceries.

Actually that has much more to do with the fact that large supermarkets do not compete under free market conditions, but they have their business model subsidised. They are the ones, e.g, who take most benefit of the public highway system, but it's the taxpayers who bear the bulk of the cost of building and maintaining them. There would be much less incentive to build big supermarkets in the outskirts if the roads leading there had to be paid primarily by the big retailers.

Book price-fixing laws are an evil which is said to combat another evil, but it is clearly inefficient in doing so: there are still huge supermarkets selling cheap paperbacks because the transport subsidy is there, plus the small book shops don't have any incentive to compete against each other or together against the big chains. Those are two evils that we consumers have to pay.

[fjtorres]

Actually, that law is very well suited to the french mindset.
(Witness the recent protests at the watered-down pension "reform" the government passed today.)
Do *not* expect any consumer revolt; the french *like* protecting their local businesses from anything vaguely resembling competition.
Of course, they also squeal with outrage any time they see comparable products selling for significantly less in comoetitive markets.
I believe France is the point of origin of the phrase: "Eating your cake and having it, too."

[Logseman]

We Spaniards are not as chauvinistic, particularly not with ebooks, yet the same law is fed through our noses.

[SensualPoet]

There's always a silver lining, as there often is in the Latin Quarter of Paris. While you are reading your "over-priced" ebook at a comfy sidewalk cafe, you can also enjoy some fabulous local cheese with your whine.

[HamsterRage]

It's a law that will be irrelevant in about 3 years, once the market for pbook novels has completely disappeared.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HamsterRage

It's a law that will be irrelevant in about 3 years, once the market for pbook novels has completely disappeared.

Yeah, like that will happen in 3 years.

Even now, 10 years post-Napster, CDs still make up 65% of the music market; digital downloads only 35%.

[SameOldStory]

Yes, I can see that they want to protect all the mom & pop booksellers. BUT....

Too bad that they didn't have these laws a hundred years ago.

Just think -
If you bought a car, you would have to pay the village blacksmith for horseshoes and a buggy whip.
If you bought a computer, you would have to pay for a slide rule.
If you bought a TV, you would have to pay for lime lights and greasepaint.
Must doctors buy blood letting equipment when they set up a practice?

I see that there are Project Gutenberg French language books available. Not that that will help current French authors.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Cliff Ball

Since a couple of US politicians want to emulate all things European, watch that idea come along in the next couple years in Congress or at the White House. Or, it'll be in the form of a big old bailout for the publishing industry.

Just a couple?

[Barcey]

I'm surprised that Queen Z hasn't overruled this one. I'm amazed that it was unanimous.

[SameOldStory]

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that high prices have to have an effect on the number of books that Europeans read per year. Does anyone have numbers on readership in the EU broken down by country?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by SameOldStory

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that high prices have to have an effect on the number of books that Europeans read per year.

Not necessarily. When I was a teenager I was an avid reader - I always had my nose in a book - but they were exclusively library books; I didn't buy books.

[AdamV]

These are stats for Poland for 2009 - only paper books:
38% of Polish citizens bought or read at least one book (58% in 2008)
40% of the 38% group were using public libraries
Most popular genres: love stories (18%), suspense & thrillers (15%), business, self-help, school books & encyclopedias (14%)

Electronic publications almost didn't exist out here back in 2009 - except for pirate copies of course. So there was no ofiicial statistics for those yet. They are starting to be more popular, but in my opinion it will take a lot of time to make them more popular.

TOday, the biggest publishers are not interested in investing money into ebooks since there is not enough reading devices in affordable prices available yet. Hardware vendors are not interested in getting the pricing for ereaders down yet since there is not enough ebooks available there thus not many customers for readers. So each side waits for the other...

Then the pricing - publishers here say that there is no reason for them to set a price of an ebook to lower level than dead tree edition since they state it is the same cost of investment for them (I do not agree with that entirely) - so the ebooks that come out now are at the similar price as paper back edition (plus DRM) so they are still not that popular (since the market is still emerging , you need to consider purchase of a reader for significant amount of money still, then buying an ebook for almost the same prices as paper edition - convincing? nah, i don't think so).

I do hope the situation will change sooner than later - more affordable ereaders, DRM free publications, cheaper ebooks with bigger and bigger selection of the titles...

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by SameOldStory

"French law-makers have just decreed that any eBook sold in France must cost the same as its paper versions in a unanimous ruling in the French Senate."

Actually? They have done no such thing. Even a casual perusal of the actual law in question with the help of Google's translation services makes it rather plain that the law does not mandate that eBooks cost the same as paper editions of the same book.

What it does, or purports to do at least, is to put eBooks under the same kind of pricing regulations as paper books if that book is available as both a paper book and an eBook. Namely, that the same eBook has to have the same fixed price, set by the publisher, regardless of where you buy it. Which, as HarryT said, has the purpose of protecting small local vendors from huge international conglomerates like Amazon.

[zeb]

I am French, so I could read the text from the senate website.

Firstly, the law has not passed, it has only gone through the 1st vote at the senate, which is one of the numerous steps before a law is published and applied. The text has to go through the assembly and the senate another 2 times, where it can be heavily revised or even ditched entirely.

Secondly, this is not what I read. The article 5 stipulates that the editor can propose a commercial discount on the public price depending on some criteria, but the price should be fixed by the editor, like for paper books. Furthermore, article 5 bis says that the author should receive the same amount for an electronic sale than for a paper sale. There is no mention of the final price to the customer, only the fact that the author should get the same margin from the ditor whatever the support, electronic or paper. Very different from what the original article is claiming.