That's interesting! So how does this regulating work exactly?
To allow bookshops to do a margin, they have a specific different agreement with editors. I _think that in general they pay a yearly flat fee to editors (in the tens of thousands of euros) and then get the books at a lower price. If they sell enough copies, they end up a profit.
The big difference is in school books, I just looked into solid mechanics, we are une the 30-70€ range in France and $80-130 range in the US (in a bad comparison, I see stuff completely irrelevant in my query result).
The trick is that the French gouvernement is not passive, it often tell industries that if they don’t change this or that, they’ll just use the law. In the end I feel it works better than in the US. In particular on book, France is under constant watch by free market entities, so they’d better reach some measure of success for the consumer or the EU will just intervene.
The goal is to preserve the French culture, it only works if French people read and write French books. If it's too expensive, people don't buy books, if it's too low, authors don't survive.
Alas, no money either for the author.
And yes, books are expensive in France. And alas again, only a small part of the price goes to the author.
They are pretty much greedy yes. Or, mainly, the big publishers. Small one struggle to survive.
And the worst part of it ? Epub and PDF are almost the same price than the hardcover versions !
The official reason is that it protects small book stores from Kindles (or any ebook reader), but I'm pretty sure it's just publishers lobbying.
And, again, in the end, the author receives only a small part of the sell.
That's atrocious and something I really dislike. I personally believe that ebooks should be cheaper - by subtracting the cost it takes to print the paper books (and that should be the maximum price).
These are marginal when selling ePub, and yet it’s still expensive in France.
Wanna know something even more stupid ?
Most of the time, you can’t buy them from out of France !
I don’t know if this is still true, but two years ago I tried to buy ePub online and couldn’t because I was not in France.
Fun fact ? I was living in the Caribbean on a French island (Guadeloupe), which is run on French laws and administration.
For traditional french comic books, the price is France is I think higher than what I observed in the US and UK.
This is partly due to traditional culture where french publishers prefer full color editions needing more work ( where in the rest of the world we're happily mixing colors and white and black), and partly due too I suppose to a lack of incentive to lower prices when the demand is so high at the moment.
Second hand books are a total free market, and are very popular items.