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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: World Book Day (22 April)
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:30:45 +0100
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 Ar an cúigiú lá is fiche de mí Aibreán, scríobh Christian Weisgerber: 

 > On 2024-04-25, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:
 > 
 > > There has been a bit of coverage lately in the bits of the web that I read
 > > of the really minimal sales of most books (in the US, because that’s where
 > > [a^H] an antitrust case revealed the details). It’s a fascinating picture,
 > > quite a hit-driven economy, lots of money lost on loads of books.
 > 
 > The argument that bestsellers subsidize the availability of a larger
 > variety of books comes up regularly in debates about fixed book
 > price laws, which exist in a number of Continental European and
 > other countries.
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price#/media/File:Countries-with-a-Fixed-Book-Price-Agreement.svg

Part of the argument in the Wikipedia article is that well-stocked bookshops
are important for cultural life, and that’s something that’s less important
with good online sources for books. Certainly if I had been attempting to
source John Perry’s Tajik Persian Reference Grammar in the 1990s (assuming it
had been published then) living in Dublin, I strongly suspect I would never
have been able to source it at all. Whereas currently (and in 2006ish) it’s
just a matter of throwing enough money at the problem.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)