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Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".

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But I think that's my point, although I didn't express it very well. I happen to be reading Ulysses right now - amazing book. But what about Danielle Steel's books? They're also books, right? There's a tremendous range, so I don't think we can have these blanket statements that books are special and that we need protection against companies like Amazon.

No, that's exactly the opposite of your point. The history of thought would not be the same with or without Ulysses, we would not be more or less the same with enough Danielle Steel. And books are not special, many other forms of human expression deserve this kind of protection.

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