(Though of course there are competing distractions, like HN and social media.)

Now, with a Nook, I love the ability to finish a book at night, realize I want to read longer, and purchase another one immediately. I don't have to plan ahead. There are a lot of upsides to purchasing them online. But, I do miss the culture and community of small bookstores.

A kindle is 0.36" (9.1mm) thick. It has the dimensions of a tiny 100-page book I have right here on my bookshelf. Fair enough if you only read books of that size, but even Harry Potter gets massive.

It's also much less fragile than a book. It seems indestructible. Meanwhile my backpack alone turns out to be a book-cover destroyer before we even get into lending books out.

I think most people here would agree that books are bulky and fragile, so it's weird to hear someone suggest that books have these advantages over an e-reader.

One killer feature for me is that e-readers have a backlight so I can read anywhere. E-ink lets me read in the sun. The backlight lets me read without an external source of light. It's a massive convenience. And the battery charge lasts weeks.

It's fair enough if you don't think e-readers are worthwhile to you, but it's in your best interest to figure out why it's not "a solution in search of a problem" for the people who buy them. A better angle is just to ask people why they like something and they'll happily illuminate the mystery.

For shorter books I agree that paper is superior, I don't have to worry about damage, battery level or theft, I can easily borrow and lend them (I think you can do that with Kindle nowadays but it can't be as convenient as lending a physical object).

I like the convenience of purchasing books online. Admittedly, though, I've lost the whole community and culture of books that small bookstores provided.

As a kid growing up in uk interested in US hip hop the specialist shops and their clientele turned me onto a whole different world.

Eventually some of the big book retailers abandoned it then it was found to be illegal in the courts. After that the supermarkets moved in and discounted the best sellers.

The decline set in for bookshops before Amazon came along.

meaning there is no competition and prices are artificially inflated for no particular reason except some ideological one. I'm not sure it's a good case for regulating the price of books.

My observation: Japan has WAY more bookshops than France without any regulation of book prices. And they produce a LOT more books locally than France ever does.

Markets tend to do both harm and good to culture, much as trade, migration, and wars have done both harm and good. Culture will always be market driven. However, there is definitely a place for culture outside of ordinary commerce.

My understanding is that the advent of the 78 record managed to popularize the Sligo style of Irish fiddling all over the world and across Ireland. Unfortunately, it caused a lot of local fiddlers to just hang their fiddle up, resulting in a tremendous die-off of regional styles. I'm also given to understand that every holler in the mountains of West Virginia had their own style of banjo. There was once a central Pennsylvania fiddle style. All of these have largely died out. (Imagine you meet a cosplayer from 200 years in the future, and their conception of "American" is a simplified homogenized mix of all 19th and 20th century American culture of all regions. This is the degree of squashing of diversity I'm talking about.)

Pre the printing press you could pretty much just get the bible hand written. With the early press far more then as you didn't need type setters more again.

Sure, if you only have that one data point, that's what you'd think. There's a lot more to it. Prior to widespread literacy, there was a tremendous amount of oral tradition and storytelling. Back in those days, if you wanted media, the family or community had to produce it, itself. (In America in the 1800s, it used to be the norm for at least one member of every family to be capable of performing at a level that would get one paid today.) Why would you think all of those would have been written down? In fact, people who study these things know much was lost. We only have a smattering of what once was.

In general it seem better tech -> lower costs -> more diverse.

The tech we had in the Industrial Revolution up through the late 20th century wasn't as interactive and capable of gathering data, and so wasn't as good at serving the long tail. So there was a bias towards only a few things that were mass produced, and unless you did a lot of legwork, that's what you got. As technology progressed, you had easier discovery/access, more customization, and more choices. In 2019, everything is preserved, everything is available if you just casually search for it. The world wasn't always that way.

You make ideology sound like a bad thing.

Depends on the particular beliefs of the ideology, no?

After all the “free market” (for lack of a better term) beliefs in your post are an ideology too ...

Even the most intellectually sound movement can become toxic.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

...

...

Whereas, Christianity doesn't hold a believe, just a religious believe.

To allow bookshops to do a margin, they have a specific different agreement with editors. I _think that in general they pay a yearly flat fee to editors (in the tens of thousands of euros) and then get the books at a lower price. If they sell enough copies, they end up a profit.

For traditional french comic books, the price is France is I think higher than what I observed in the US and UK.

This is partly due to traditional culture where french publishers prefer full color editions needing more work ( where in the rest of the world we're happily mixing colors and white and black), and partly due too I suppose to a lack of incentive to lower prices when the demand is so high at the moment.

Second hand books are a total free market, and are very popular items.

Alas, no money either for the author.

And yes, books are expensive in France. And alas again, only a small part of the price goes to the author.

They are pretty much greedy yes. Or, mainly, the big publishers. Small one struggle to survive.

And the worst part of it ? Epub and PDF are almost the same price than the hardcover versions !

The official reason is that it protects small book stores from Kindles (or any ebook reader), but I'm pretty sure it's just publishers lobbying.

And, again, in the end, the author receives only a small part of the sell.

That's atrocious and something I really dislike. I personally believe that ebooks should be cheaper - by subtracting the cost it takes to print the paper books (and that should be the maximum price).

These are marginal when selling ePub, and yet it’s still expensive in France.

Wanna know something even more stupid ?

Most of the time, you can’t buy them from out of France !

I don’t know if this is still true, but two years ago I tried to buy ePub online and couldn’t because I was not in France.

Fun fact ? I was living in the Caribbean on a French island (Guadeloupe), which is run on French laws and administration.

The big difference is in school books, I just looked into solid mechanics, we are une the 30-70€ range in France and $80-130 range in the US (in a bad comparison, I see stuff completely irrelevant in my query result).

The trick is that the French gouvernement is not passive, it often tell industries that if they don’t change this or that, they’ll just use the law. In the end I feel it works better than in the US. In particular on book, France is under constant watch by free market entities, so they’d better reach some measure of success for the consumer or the EU will just intervene.

The goal is to preserve the French culture, it only works if French people read and write French books. If it's too expensive, people don't buy books, if it's too low, authors don't survive.

Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a fantastic experience for me !

This is a fairly rare experience for bookstores in some of the U.S. geographies I've lived in.

The shopkeepers I encounter aren't widely-read or intellectuals. They're either college students working at slightly above minimum wage to pay for school, or ex-hippies with lots of used books in their garage who figured they could make some money selling them. They have no sense of the intellectual pulse of today (they don't know what ideas are popular), don't have a good mental semantic tree of authors and their works, and worst of all, aren't readers themselves. I don't expect bookstore owners to have the omnivorous interests and breadth of Tyler Cowen, but they should at least have intellectual curiosity and a love of books.

The only exceptions are bookstores near great universities, where the owners tend to be stragglers who loved their university town so much that they stayed. They're usually former English lit, philosophy or other humanities majors who continue to read widely. You can tell a bookstore is good by the quality of their curation -- really good bookstores understand space is a premium and don't stock junk.

That said, you also need someone with a mind for business. Unfortunately this confluence of skills doesn't occur regularly so we live with what we have.

Another is the available of cheaper international paperback editions online.

For translated books, I do not find bookshops striving to carry as many different translations of the same work as possible, most carry only one, when some works like Homer and the Russians Greats are published in very many translations.

My point is rather than in France the advantages offered by the physical bookstores (namely, its friendly employers) outweighs that, in part because the online marketplace doesn't have a price advantage. Of course, in the end it's a matter of sensitivity to various criterias, stock definitely being a relevant one !

The problem with the large catalog on sites like Amazon is that it's impossible (at least for me) to sort through it if you are just browsing. If I'm in a bookstore I always find new and interesting books that I end up buying and enjoying.

That could have something to do with Amazon's sorting/searching features, which are so bad that the results are often comical, with random unrelated results intermixed with the thing you're looking for.

Default sorting is by the "Featured" variable, which probably means 'makes most money for the seller', rather than something that actually benefits the searcher. This is a guess, it is not defined.

I think they maybe, finally, let you sort items when you're searching outside of a specific category now, but that's a relatively recent development.

It doesn't help that less than scrupulous Amazon sellers are constantly changing products around so that reviews don't line up with the product description. That widget you've found with 100 five star reviews, well, it turns out that the reviews were for a different product, but you can't tell unless you go read enough of the reviews to figure that out.

In France, the software they use is more powerful than Amazon to buy books. The database is clean, deduplicated and well maintained by professionals that know each others.

That's part of it, but the price is a lot of it, too. I rarely go to bookstores anymore, even for books that I know I'll find there, because the books are more expensive than at Amazon.