> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now.

So in the end the seller with the best service will win.

I would welcome this. The French brick and mortar book stores are great and I love nothing more than spending hours at end walking through their aisles. They typically look small from the outside but then they are built like mazes, retrofitted into the building they happen to inhabit, branching out left and right, up and down.They specialise in topics, apparently by preference of the owners. Around my corner I have one that focuses on psychology and urban planning for example.

The one thing they're really lacking is a good distribution system. Trying to order a book they don't have in stock, especially foreign ones, can often result in multi week delivery times or even a flat-out "no" which is insane to me since I'm from Germany and there we've had next day delivery to any shop in the country since the mid 90s at least.

So this should help level the playing field and make it worthwhile for the book shops to compete in delivery times, because if I understand this correctly I would NOT have to pay delivery if I go to pick up a book in the store?

> The French brick and mortar book stores are great

> I'm from Germany and there we've had

Well, drop by at happily coincidentally current https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28976112 and drop note of some places, then. In a possible path: is the Waterstone in Bruxelles good as they say?

That's how it is in my local store, no shipping costs if you pick it up at their's.

It just removes the price out of the equation. There will be any number of other factors pushing a customer to choose a store or another.

On a personal level, delivery network was a big one, and Amazon wasn't the best on this as you can't choose in most cases (delivery guys randomly calling on my phone because they got lost in another town...). But everyone will have their pet peeve, some people will just chose on how warm they feel about the company.

> It just removes the price out of the equation.

I too welcome our post-scarcity future :)

This feels like a joke, but deciding on where/how to buy something completely ignoring the price (same everywhere) is refreshing.

There's few similar experiences, perhaps movie theaters before they started monthly plans/membership programs. I can't think of any other day to day instance where price comparison is explicitly rendered moot.

In situations like this the end user typically pays dears for that "luxury'.

Similar to cell phone service in Canada. Prices are carefully negotiated with carriers and as a results Canadians pay some of the highest cell phone fee in the world.

Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....

Sure they can sell more books if open longer, have more resources, etc.

But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.

Getting fake or low quality garbage from Amazon has made me stop using their product most entirely. I have 0 faith in it and I will gladly pay the inconvenience of driving or 5-10% more for a retail store brand.

There's some percentage of people that always want to pay the lowest price and if the product turns out to be fake they return it. Say you order 100 things over a month and 5% turn out to be fake the only cost is time (Amazon pays for shipping if the product is fake I believe). That's compared to paying 10% more on every product plus the time it takes to go to the store.

Honestly if I can’t trust that a company is delivering a real product or not I’m OUT. That’s a violation of trust. And it’s happened to me multiple times on Amazon—nowhere else.

Well, no free shipping anymore ...

All these fall into "having the best service" IMO.

> This proposition is coming on top of that: it will block sellers from artificially discounting books by subsidizing shipping cost. It is basically closing a loophole that still allowed Amazon to have lower prices than others.

So you are basically not allowed to pass the savings to your customers if you manage to innovate with your supply chain... That's interesting.

how about intentionally flawing the book by adding a line with a pen somewhere or similar. that's how I have it seen done in Germany to bypass price fixing.

Even a damaged book can't be sold at a discount (only for newly sold).

so the consumer loses here

Depends on what you mean by that, but if it's about getting lower prices, the consumer probably "lost" more than a decade ago.

I don't have an opinion on how freshly published best-sellers should be sold, to me it's the same as new movies going into theaters...I personally don't care and will wait for the home/digital version. It's not like it will rot in place.

Amazon can still lower price on old books if they really want to. All in all it's about dirty plays between (big) dirty players, and regulators are mostly running around closing loopholes.

No, Jeff Bezos loses. Everyone else wins. Yes, the consumer pays more for a book but he also lives in an economy with better paid jobs, free healthcare, free education, and more competing bookstores.

Amazon's low costs is only possible because they externalize their costs to society.

No, Amazon's low costs are because of scale economies and physical network effects. Exxon's low costs are because they externalize the costs to society. Let's be accurate. They may have some externalities but it's not a big part of their business.

Also price fixing the books doesn't imply better paid anything, there's no large causal connection there.

Overall this is a win for pirates, inefficient booksellers and Amazon's margins. The anti-dumping perspective is a farfetched narrative given it isn't actual dumping, it's just very low margin selling, and moreover bookselling isn't a natural monopoly and has low barriers to entry so dumping incentives don't really exist.

When you pay workers less than what they need to survive, you externalize the wage to society.

When you use temps in stead of real employees, you externalize their healthcare etc. as well.

When you sell books in Europe, but you don't pay taxes like European bookstores, you externalize that as well.

When you use predatory pricing for more than a decade, and it kills off real bookstores, that's an externality as well.

When you ship items one by one with trucks and planes, you have a large CO2 footprint. Again an externality.

Amazon is not some genius new high-tech business model, winning because they are smarter than everyone else. It's just low wages, predatory pricing, tax avoidance and disregard for the environment.

> but you don't pay taxes like European bookstores

If true, this isn't Amazon's fault, and it's not an externality either. If there's a loophole in the tax law, the onus is on the EU or France to fix it, the onus isn't on Amazon to voluntarily give extra money above and beyond what's required. No business ever does this. Moreover, price fixing books doesn't fix the tax loophole.

> large CO2 footprint.

That's why I said "They may have some externalities", similar in extent to many other businesses that operate in the physical world. Per-shipped item, Amazon probably has the least amount of externalities compared to other bookstores thanks to operational efficiency, so on the carbon externality point they should be celebrated (on a relative basis). Also, this is an argument for a carbon price, not an argument for price fixing of books.

> externalize the wage // externalize their healthcare

These aren't externalities. Amazon pays enough money for them to live. If the public votes to give them extra handouts then that isn't Amazon's fault. You would also need to make the argument that low-skilled labor on aggregate would be earning more money if Amazon wasn't around, which is a claim I strongly dispute. Part of the improvement in operational efficiency is passed on as superior wages relative to other low-skilled labor.

> It's just low wages, predatory pricing, tax avoidance and disregard for the environment.

Strong disagree. It is high wages (relative to market rates for that skill tier), competitive pricing, tax compliance, less pollution on a per-item basis, PLUS extreme operational efficiency and economies of scale/physical network effects (the latter in this list being the most dominant explanatory variable).

Amazon also pays its workers dimes and lets the social programs make up for it - like how workers in US use foodstamps etc. There is more than one way to dump the cost onto the society.

It's not actually possible to work at Amazon and qualify for food stamps, unless you are a single parent with multiple children. Amazon simply pays too much.

For this argument to make sense, you would first have to show that in the absence of Amazon, low-skilled labor on aggregate (including the people currently working there) would be making more than they currently are making. If it turns out that they would be making less, then it's not a coherent argument because it means that Amazon's presence has caused welfare costs to go down.

An example. Suppose someone is working at the best job they could find for $8/hour, and I decide to hire them for $15/hour. Am I "dumping the cost onto society"? Maybe you could frame it that way, but in reality my contribution has been to reduce the burden on society by $7/hour.

There is no such thing as free health care or free education. You pay it through heavy taxation where France is the champion.

European healthcare and education is great, far cheaper than American, and it is indeed free for many of the patients and students.

Compared to how US private healthcare sucks the blood out of Americans, French healthcare is pretty much 'free'.

Half of all US healthcare is paid for my the Federal government (Medicare, Medicaid and VA). Since the US spends nearly twice as much as a proportion of GDP and more since US GDP is higher, the Federal share of US health care alone is more than the entire French spending as a proportion of GDP.

I wonder whether the customer really wins, if, eventually, one or two companies control handle all book sales. Global vs local optimum situation.

No, amazon loses here. They cannot dump the market with prime anymore.