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

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/books/review/should-the-united-states-declare-books-an-essential-good.html

by drobertduke • 12 years ago

49 27 12 years ago

dkopi2• 12 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.

vegedor3• 12 years ago

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

dkopi2• 12 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.

jckt• 12 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• 12 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• 12 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?

WalterBright3• 12 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.

rbehrends2• 12 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...

mschuster91• 12 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 :/

chestnut-tree• 12 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...

vegedor3• 12 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 :/

r0s• 12 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• 12 years ago

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

WalterBright3• 12 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• 12 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.

a3_nm3• 12 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.

rbehrends2• 12 years ago

No source is given for the claim that "The French government has declared books an 'essential good.'"

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...

icebraining• 12 years ago

the problem is that the role of booksellers, to select interesting books and guide you in your choice, is lost.

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.

a3_nm3• 12 years ago

It depends a lot where you go, and I'm not an expert in this either, but there are some libraries and bookshops in France which will advertise obscure books with a custom criticism handwritten by someone from the staff; or where you can pop in saying "I'm looking for a good textbook for a beginner-level Russian speaker who wishes to learn French" and get useful advice. It is, of course, marginal in volume compared to large chains, but it exists. (I wouldn't be able to say, however, if it is more common in France than elsewhere.)

(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.)

seszett• 12 years ago

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.

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...

a3_nm3• 12 years ago

The 5.5% rate applies, beyond books, to a bunch of other things which are hardly first necessity: e.g., theater, cinema, the importation of works of art and antiques. http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle...

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.

twic• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, VAT on books in 0% in the UK:

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.

highCs• 12 years ago

No source is given for the claim

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law

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

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