[dkopi]

" 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]

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]

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]

"...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]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[dkopi]

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.

[ddebernardy]

In a perfect world, publishers would do what they did in the past, i.e. contribute to giving feedback on the contents and the title, proof-reading and copy-editing, making the cover, taking some financial risk by printing the book, distributing it to a pre-existing network of bookstores, sending it to book reviewers prior to releasing it, and promoting it.

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.)

[WalterBright]

> In a perfect world, publishers would do what they did in the past

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.)

[vegedor]

Join the winning team, amazon and the likes. Or read free e-books.

[DanBC]

And even JK Rowling had to go through 12 publishers before she got a deal.