Amazon has found itself in hot water in France, as government authorities were ready to hit the company with hefty fines. This stems from a new law that was signed by France’s ruling Socialist Party and the opposition UMP Party that banned online retailers from shipping discounted books for free. It comes in the form of an amendment to a 32-year-old law that sets the value of new books at fixed prices. Instead of fighting it out with the French government, Amazon has bowed to pressure and will no longer ship books for free.
Amazon has increased the cost of shipping books by one centime. This is basically sending books out for only a penny, which satisfies the new laws but circumvents the spirit of it.
Culture minister Aurelie Filippetti has previously singled out Amazon, saying that it “destroys” bookshops. “Once they are in a dominant position and will have crushed our network of bookshops, they will bring prices back up,” she told a conference of booksellers last year.
France is highly protective of its bookshops, enshrining measures to preserve them in law since 1981 when discounts above 5% were banned to prevent big chains from using bulk orders to undercut smaller independent bookshops. France has 3,500 bookshops compared to just 1,000 in the U.K., of which roughly 700 are independent.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
