Should the United States Declare Books an ‘Essential Good’?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They've recently just tried this law in Israel. The result? The printing of New books has screeched to a halt. When you can't offer discounts on new books, the publishers are only willing to take the chance on famous well established authors. The law is especially absurd, because even if you're a self published author, you can't offer discounts on your own books.
When you pass laws against book discounts, fewer books will be published, fewer books will be bought and fewer books will be read.
When price controls and discount bans are enforced on book publishers and book stores, publishers are much less willing to take risks on unknown authors.
Sure, a new JK Rowling or Danielle Steele book will always find someone willing to publish them, but would a young aspiring author be able too?
The good news is that publishing costs and risks have dropped thanks to e-books and crowd sourcing for books. But most books still need a publisher willing to take a financial risk in order to see the light of day.
In today's world, they kind of still do that, but spend so little time, energy and money on it that it's impossible for them to even remotely justify the huge cut they take with a straight face. Innate talent left aside, whether an author wannabe's book sells well or not entirely depends on his willingness to promote it by showing up at events and bookstores.
As such, you're just as well off -- and more often than not, better off -- relying on friends for feedback and copy-editing, self-publishing an ebook, and reaching out to your audience directly through mostly online channels.
(I worked in a brick and mortar bookstore, and have been watching the situation degrade over the years ever since. Methinks that, much like the press at large, publishers only have themselves to blame.)
I can't help but be skeptical that book publishing was perfect a few years ago!
(And hey, book publishing itself was a very disruptive industry - one could even argue that it precipitated the industrial revolution.)
That probably leaves the question about books that become "accidental hits" or "sleeper hits". But even then, this discounts aren't going to completely wipe them out and I would believe that these sorts are the exception rather than the norm. Again, there are simply so many new books published all the time, and very little of it can possibly be good.
Gwern has some good thoughts that I feel are relevant:
That is the only kind of "good" there is.
You are correct that new books are not intrinsically good because there is no such thing as intrinsic good, ever.
That view is based on invalid philosophical theories.
Thanks, Plato.
that is, how should this good be taxed, is it something essential like food that should carry a low tax rate?
Because in France and Germany, the exact opposite happens: the profits of bestsellers are being used to cross-subsidize new books and new authors. This is in fact one of the rationales behind both countries having price-fixing laws: namely, to preserve the profit margin for bestsellers to make such cross-subsidies possible.
You can argue whether that is fair (I know there are plenty of French and German readers who'd rather have cheaper bestsellers instead of books by new authors that they may never read), but both countries have a healthy book publishing industry.
So, while this may not have worked in Israel, in France and Germany plenty of books are being published, bought, and read. In fact, Germany publishes more books per capita and year than the US, even though German publishers can't easily sell to the much bigger international English language market.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per...
Yeah, we Germans unfortunately seem to need to get everything translated or dubbed - games, tv shows and books :/
The publishing market seems to vary quite a bit country-by-country judging by the comments here.
In the UK, we also had an agreement between publishers and booksellers called the Net Book Agreement [1] which set fixed book prices. The original defence of the agreement was that it subsidised important but less popular works. The Agreement was scrapped in 1997.
What effect did that have on the publishing market? For a start, discounts by online retailers and even supermarkets have altered people's expectations of book pricing. Most people simply don't expect to pay full price for new titles anymore. Many independent bookshops can't compete on price and have closed. However, the number (and variety) of books published hasn't declined - quite the opposite: new and revised titles have grown substantially according to the Guardian report below [2]. But some publishers feel there are too many titles being published and the volume isn't sustainable.
Books, magazines and newspapers are exempt from VAT in the UK. However, e-books are subject to full (UK) VAT rate of 20%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-mo...
- No source is given for the claim that "The French government has declared books an 'essential good.'", I have been unable to find any French source about this, and I am entirely unaware of such a declaration. I would be interested if anyone could point me to more information about this.
- There is a fixed price law on books, which to my knowledge has nothing to do with them being considered "essential". The way it works is that the book publisher sets the final sale price of the book that will have to be applied everywhere (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_relative_au_prix_du_livre)... a maximal rebate of 5% is permitted, which in practice is applied everywhere (except for online sales, see below). This is not unique to France and exists in several countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement#Sco...). My understanding of the point of this measure is that it reduces competition between booksellers, allowing smaller booksellers to survive, and allowing them to offer rarer books than just blockbusters.
- There is a cultural attachment to smaller bookshops, and a dislike of large foreign players (Amazon) even compared to large French players (Fnac, Gibert-Joseph, etc.). The smaller bookshops claim that Amazon's free shipping poses a great threat to their existence. Free shipping was challenged by the French Booksellers Association, ultimately unsuccessfully (http://www.maitre-eolas.fr/post/2008/05/15/954-le-prix-du-li...). Recently, however, a law was passed to achieve the same results, with online booksellers being forbidden to offer free shipping (hence Amazon.fr charges 0.01 EUR shipping for books) and being forbidden to offer the 5% discount. (http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTE... article 1). Of course, one could also argue that online bookselling makes books more easily available to the end consumer (and faster, say, than asking a library to order your books for you); but the problem is that the role of booksellers, to select interesting books and guide you in your choice, is lost.
It was part of the rationale behind the introduction of the Loi Lang (the "loi relative au prix du livre" you refer to above) in 1981. More importantly, this was how the French government managed to defend the law before the ECJ.
See: http://www.librairiesatlantiques.com/index.php/les-grands-do...
Are booksellers in France really prepared to do that kind of guidance? To me that sounds like a romantic but unrealistic view, since it requires them to be both very well read and good judges of character. I've met people like that, but they're usually not interested in burning their life savings and losing their salaries to spend their days selling copies of Twilight.
(I am not especially familiar with it myself, but I would imagine that a good bookseller, or librarian, can be really important to people who are poorer, or less educated. If you want to read something or learn about something, it may be easier if you have someone to ask, rather than if you have just the Amazon website with a huge choice but no guidance.)
VAT for books in France is 5,5%[0] which is also called the "reduced rate for first necessity products"[1].
It is the same rate as for food and water. Other cultural goods, transportation, fast-food and other products have a 10% rate, and the regular rate for all other non-special products is 20%.
[0] http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprise...
[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxe_sur_la_valeur_ajout%C3%A9e...
The Wikipedia article you mention refers to the 5.5% rate as "common consumption, first necessity, or to favor certain sectors. I would think that books would rather fall in that last category.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-notice-70110-...
Not because we're some sort of literary paradise, though. Probably some civil servant decided in the '50s that books were improving and zero-rated them, and now everyone would kick up a fuss if it changed.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law
Talk to any businessman. He'll say he believes in the free market, but his business is special and deserves special protection.
But there's no 5% discount on Congressmen.
Are those companies worth saving despite a changing medium? That's the real question.
Consider the intrinsic value to be much higher than the production cost of books, so much that free information can be guarantied by law, where books should be equal to internet access, a telephone and if you will a TV; or the socially direct communication through people. Books as medium are inseparable from the speech and should therefore remain free speech and not seizable, whether essential or merely sufficient. This is partly guaranteed through public libraries, but the capacity is limited, compared to a distributed model.
tl;dr: didn't read the link :/