Should the United States Declare Books an ‘Essential Good’?

Should the United States Declare Books an ‘Essential Good’?(nytimes.com)

49 points by drobertduke 11 years ago | 27 comments

dkopi 11 years ago |

" At the same time, price discounts on books are limited to 5 percent and can’t be offered in conjunction with free shipping."

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.

WalterBright 11 years ago | |

There's a book entitled "Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls" by Robert L. Schuettinger that ought to be required reading for anyone who thinks that either price controls are a new idea or that this time they'll work.

rbehrends 11 years ago | |

This seems to be more a lesson in the difficulty of bottling a solution that works in one country and reusing it elsewhere.

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...

chestnut-tree 11 years ago | | |

"...the profits of bestsellers are being used to cross-subsidize new books and new authors"

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...

mschuster91 11 years ago | | |

> even though German publishers can't easily sell to the much bigger international English language market.

Yeah, we Germans unfortunately seem to need to get everything translated or dubbed - games, tv shows and books :/

jckt 11 years ago | |

While I am inclined to agree with you (government overreach? almost sounds like some form of censorship, as a law), I think it's fallacious to believe that new books have some intrinsic good. In fact, new books probably don't, if we take into account the vast number of them being written every year. And I do think that if someone has written something great, a discount is unlikely going to do it any real damage. The point is that good books will be good, and their newness has little to do with it. Conversely, classics are classics for a reason.

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:

http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20Esthetics

javert 11 years ago | | |

If someone pays for a book, that person wanted the book.

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.

NeverEnough 11 years ago | | |

I believe they mean good as in a consumer good, not a moral good.

that is, how should this good be taxed, is it something essential like food that should carry a low tax rate?

vegedor 11 years ago | |

To a halt? Surely people will keep writing regardless and somebody will want to read it.

dkopi 11 years ago | | |

Its not the writing that's an issue. It's the publishing. Taking someone's writing and turning that into a book requires work and funding.

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.

a3_nm 11 years ago |

To give some more information about the French perspective here:

- 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.

WalterBright 11 years ago |

"Books have no privileged position in the American system of law and commerce. We, the workers of the book business — writers, agents, editors, designers, publicists, booksellers and others — often bemoan this fact. Books, it seems to us, are different. [...] Surely our industry deserves special treatment."

Talk to any businessman. He'll say he believes in the free market, but his business is special and deserves special protection.

drivingmenuts 11 years ago | |

If you have enough money, you can achieve the American dream of having your business receive special protection.

But there's no 5% discount on Congressmen.

r0s 11 years ago |

Books record ideas, but the medium itself is usually bottom of the barrel commodity trash. Where does that paper come from? Who printed it and how is that business run?

Are those companies worth saving despite a changing medium? That's the real question.

FranOntanaya 11 years ago |

The content is an essential good, but the container is just a container.

vegedor 11 years ago |

You don't die without them, Books are not essential for Live. They are not really essential for learning development either, but an essential factor in the development of culture since the invention of the book-press.

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 :/