Welfare for Booksellers

The New York Times has a sympathetic article in today's paper about the plight of booksellers in Germany. For some time they have been freed from the forces of competition:

Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

The system's future, however, is uncertain:

Now this system is under threat from, of all people, the Swiss. Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.

Then there's this, which about made me want to gag:

If you’re a skeptic, you might associate fixed pricing with a German impulse toward conformity and an aversion to traditional haggling cultures. A German will stare blankly at you if you even suggest such a thought. Instead they will stress the special place books have in society.

“Germany has always considered itself a late nation, by which we mean that we came together late in history as a nation, and what has always brought us together is the concept of education,” said Thomas Sparr, the Frankfurt publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag, a large and prestigious house. “Books are inseparable from our self-identity.”

Yeah, these booksellers are a bunch of saints. This isn't about maintaining a cartel, it's about much more high-minded goals like preserving German culture and tradition.

In the rest of the article the author talks to other like-minded booksellers, who claim that the German way of life is under siege. Not once, however, did he interview a consumer. Amazingly neither did he give much mention to online booksellers. Rather than go from book shop to book shop looking for a particular title I can simply go to amazon.com (which, by the way, has a German version) and have access to literally millions of them without leaving my house or office. If that isn't a boon for books, culture and literacy I don't know what is.

But for some reason the author is caught up in the notion of preserving small little bookshops. Look, if people like them that much and they really have so much to offer then they shouldn't be concerned about competition. You see similar stuff in the media when it comes to mom and pop retailers losing out to Wal-Mart. The narrative is always the same, that the free market is destroying everything it touches with no appreciation for the gains from this process -- in this case lower prices and greater selection.