That is, in the US the vision is generally something along the lines of Amazon vs. small independent stores a la "You've Got Mail".

In France, there are big, multi-day book fairs that take up large swaths of major cities. I visited Lyon during the Quais du Polar festival years ago, which is a 3 or 4 day event focused just on the crime fiction genre. I've never experienced anything like that in the US.

It’s too bad, book festivals can be a lot of fun. I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2019 and the estimate was 400k people over the 5 days. High school kids were even taking class field trips to hear author talks. It was really nice to see so many people excited for books.

In modern times, this is an incidental cost of access.

There's also some understandable doubts about the long term results of this tradeoff, as it is suspected that the final stage of this play is to raise prices again, thereby squeezing access up to some "optimal" equilibrium.

Are more people actually brought into the fold?

The rise of Amazon seems to correlate with fewer people also needing libraries and that libraries store fewer books.

The problem is that the prerequisite for using Amazon and libraries with fewer books is the wealth to fund a networked computer and the knowledge how to use it.

As someone from a blue collar background whose education utilized the dead trees of the local libraries quite extensively, I'm not at all sure that this wouldn't be an obstacle if I had to go through education today. That is concerning to me.

Even as someone highly trained in tech, I find that when I need knowledge from before about 1995, that knowledge has become increasingly difficult to access. The knowledge likely isn't online, and so many of the books have been destroyed that browsing the stacks is quite often unsuccessful nowadays.

Consequently, your searches had a built in "proximity" result--which would give you more knowledge and keywords to do your next search with.

Walmart has increased the standard of living of the lower class quit considerably.

In the 1980's everything was kind of expensive. From 1990-2010 with the rise of real globalisation it was just unbelievable what could be had for a a few dollars.

I think most people would notice it if Walmart were to suddenly disappear.

That said, anything cultural is probably worth preserving, usually we don't price in those things well enough.

Also, 'quality' and other intangibles don't fare well into the equation.

So it's a matter of being really smart with the regulation, and hopefully sorting out the tax regimes as well so as to not allow the 'Ireland Tax Haven' scenarios.

I don’t see this as necessarily a good thing. People buying a bunch of low quality products that are designed to be as cheap as possible and then just tossing them in the trash when they inevitably break is terrible for the environment.

Walmart probably more than anything else has uplifted the lives of the bottom 1/3 and given them to live at the material standard of living rivalling the middle class.

The truth is - most things we use, we don't need very high quality.

Your plates, knives, glasses? They'll outlast you.

Your clothes will as well, unless you're using them for labour, in which case people know quality matters.

The basketball you buy is not going to get worn out any time soon.

But the ability to be cookery, deck chairs, plastic anything, video games, music, sporting good, bedding etc. is basically transformational.

I do think there are quality issues (and cultural) here and there but for most part it's a pretty big win.

The other two options are poor people go without completely, or rich people share their wealth with poor people and lower their quality of life so poor people can raise their quality of life.

That's the kind of rich I talk about when I say "rich", btw, not some doctor or lawyer.

Japan produced crap. They got better.

China is in the same boat now.

And it makes the world more fragile and less diverse and interesting. Capitalism is founded on the idea of many producers competing for many customers.

Amazon model steps as middleman so producers have only one buyer, and consumers have only one seller. That gives them a lot of power to control prices, and what is produced or consumed.

Monopsony and monopoly all in one.

For international HN'ers, a question: is the boardgame "Monopoly" popular in your country? Here in the US it's an old classic.

But our house doesn't have it and I'd be fine if my kid never saw it.

The world of modern boardgaming is so much more varied and fun.

Monopoly lost to the competition. :-)

Though I don't think people playing it get the original idea being its design

Although I agree with this, but I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing for the customers. Some industries are best centralized and some are not. For the business of selling books I think it's best to have a lot of sellers.

> There are other things that are important aside from customer purchasing power.

Would you be able to elaborate on this or was it hyperbole? Personal experience is where there is passenger rail service are inherently more interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/Americans-Democratic-Experience-Danie...

There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.

The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.

Cars are post-railroad. It can be true that car-centric places are less interesting, while it is also true that the railroad killed local culture.

This is probably true, but also probably inevitable. As the world shrinks we lose local flavor but gain a more commonly held homogeneous culture. I'm not sure that this is new, just faster than it was before.

Another way of phrasing that: France’s local book sellers are so bad at serving their customers that an American company that’s existed less than 30 years can totally undercut them, despite the local sellers’ massive advantage in understanding their local communities and culture.

I don’t know why folks are so willing to jump to protect small businesses that don’t do a good job. Local is fundamentally a good place to be. Local is an advantage. (Amazon knows this; see how they’re using Whole Foods to create a local presence and _improve_ their service). Large businesses got to be large because they were better at serving their customers than the small businesses.

My personal experience is that the small businesses are just worse at providing consistent, friendly, high quality service. They are rewarded by the market accordingly.

Government protection for heritage is maybe ok, but protecting lazy, self-entitled business owners from competitive market forces is not. If there’s really a problem with shipping costs that they desperately need to fix, they can just make postage cheaper for books, similar to the USPS media mail program.

Setting aside the fact that we've had two years of covid with months of curfew and lockdown that has absolutely murdered bookstores (but not Amazon), the real reason is simple: Amazon has a massive delivery network and allows for browsing online. Why do they? Because they have the money and the time to keep their stocks updated, and the scale to send out full trucks of packages to subsidise the delivery. Why don't small bookstores do ? Because they're single/dual employee places that do not have the time to keep a website updated, and cannot afford to send out a bike for delivery of a 10€ book.

This is not Amazon being "better". This is Amazon being naturally advantaged by being massive. There's no being rewarded by the market, simply being crushed by the billions of dollars of your competitor.

And if we're going to speak of laziness, Amazon is certainly a lazier company than any of the book stores I've been to.

Did any of those advantages exist before Amazon was massive? Or did Amazon become massive because it was providing better service?

Online ordering is complicated for Amazon because Amazon is massive. It is not that complicated for small bookstores, who absolutely are using computerized inventory (at least every small bookstore I’ve ever been to has). Even if online ordering isn’t an option, “call your friendly bookstore employee to order” is an option. That’s what I mean by not being lazy - you can jump to excuses and asking the government to help, or you can come up with creative solutions to serve your customers.

Speaking of COVID, there actually are strong parallels. At the start of the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants just gave up and closed - they didn’t even attempt to find creative solutions. Other restaurants - presumably the ones with less lazy and/or stuck-in-their-ways owners - came up with creative solutions. They did takeout. They made stay-at-home craft projects to foster community over social media. They offered cooking classes with local meal kit delivery. They adapted their restaurants to facilitate delivery and takeout. Several restaurants actually ended up with larger, more prosperous businesses.

Also: it may strain your imagination, but Amazon was large and successful _before_ they had a delivery network. And they continued to grow because they provided better service, even when they were dependent on UPS and USPS. French booksellers (and all booksellers) could have chosen to improve their service in the face of competition for the years it took Amazon to create a delivery network.

At least in the US (maybe the French could copy if it doesn’t work like this) local shipping via post is actually very fast; very likely within two days if it doesn’t need to go to a distribution center. Amazon has to build thousands of warehouses to take advantage of that; grandpa’s local bookseller can naturally take advantage of that geographic locality to customers. Or they could team up with other booksellers and form a shipping alliance/partnership (this also exists among US local bookstores). Shoprunner exists. There are creative solutions beyond just giving up and asking the government to make books more expensive for everyone.

Local booksellers (the good ones, anyway) are doing fine in the US, even post-COVID. So I don’t really know why you’re making excuses for them. The French people deserve to get great service from their local booksellers.

Physical bookstores have their own charm and it would be a shame to lose them just because it's cheaper and more convenient to order online.

Running a large online store is hard! Harder than running a small local business. Amazon.com has a giant fraud target painted on its back. Local stores can make a strong case for being more ethical and for shopping local. I would think, given the position of labor in French society, that it would be easy to get people to choose local if it is even somewhat close in terms of price and service.

The fake stuff on Amazon is a great case for skipping them entirely. The fact that (apparently) the government thinks that local booksellers cannot compete with a fraud/scam-riddled, employee-abusing marketplace is a giant red flag. Being a victim of fraud, and having to worry about fraud, is actually very inconvenient IMO.

I shop local when local means better service, better quality, locally-sourced ingredients, a better browsing experience (especially applicable to books), or really any other advantage. The bar for not buying online is on the floor; the only people to blame for small business not clearing that bar are small business owners.

It seems obvious but nobody ever calls that behavior what it is, along with "cultural protection" which is really an attempt to treat the choices of others like your own property in what would be called overwhelming arrogance in most other contexts.

Some level of protectionism is very beneficial for a country.

Centralization is also densification, which has merits backed by scientific research. It's, in theory, better for everyone - well, for everyone else.

Doesn't it increase overall happiness?

Who's judging the quality, if not the consumers?

If people loved French content they'd buy it in droves from Amazon anyway. If they don't... why not?

You wouldn’t want to live in a world like that, but you also aren’t likely to fight it yourself and even if you tried you probably wouldn’t succeed.

It’s basically why we have any sort of regulation.

Well what do people want?! Is anyone asking?

If people aren't buying French literature from French bookshops without Government subsidy... then maybe people don't want that.

I want to shop locally. I don’t vote for a law to require myself to shop locally. I just go ahead and shop locally.

The only need for a law is to force someone who doesn’t want to shop locally to do so against their will!

I remember reading about an experiment at Google where they reduced snacking by simply putting an opaque cover on the snacks. When people see chocolate bars, there is a chance they'll turn and get one. They may consider they made the decision rationally but they didn't.

In moments of rationality, it seems reasonable to me to devise and legislate ways to protect yourself from future impulses. It's a paradox for sure, but our impulsive/rationale nature is the source of the paradox, and is unavoidable.

When you "ask" the market by offering food, people may rush to the high-calory fastfood offerings. In a moment of reason, you may want to regulate this (e.g. ban fast food ads around kids), so that you don't live in an obese-ridden society.

In the quest for ever increasing safety, someone might ban tap water because one guy choked on it. That would be hilarious.

If everyone thinks like this then the tragedy of the commons occurs. Everyone prefers local businesses to exist over the online monopoly, but nobody changes their purchasing behavior from what is cheap and convenient. By voting restrictions on online monopolies people avert the tragedy of the commons by coordinating (and compelling) what they want.

What’s the commons in this case?

Other people’s bookshops? Other people’s books? They aren’t commons.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem