What would Lang’s Law look like if it expanded beyond France’s borders? We’ve touched on the law glancingly already, but similar laws also currently exist in seventeen other countries outside of France, and there are studies out there that suggest that the repeal of laws fixing the prices of books harm independent bookshops, make bestsellers cheaper, and make every other book that isn’t a bestseller more expensive.
So if we’ve seen a 50% reduction in independent bookstores in the United States over the past twenty years, would some sort of U.S.-based (or global) Lang’s Law help restore retail margins by eliminating Amazon’s one-penny-for-a-book undercutting (amongst other practices?) Would we want that? Would we want less choice? (And what if the notion of low-pricing equaling more choice ends up looking like a S-curve instead of a J-curve, anyway?) Would you rather have The Huffington Post or The Wire? (And I say that not only to use them as cultural synecdoches, not only because of the testimony David Simon and Arianna Huffington gave to Congress a few years back, but also because the internet as a whole reacted almost entirely like this, too, and I think that kind of myopia is worth pointing out, even if the latest coinage denoting ‘The Internet Outrage Machine’ suggests that that particular issue hasn’t necessarily gotten better.)
And what about the awful sight of authors rising and falling on their first try? How much more of a risk would publishers be willing to take on unknown names if there was a much more robust Lang’s Law-like law in place? How much more willing would bookstores be to not display the latest Oprah pick or some sort of EL James slapdashery on the first table when you walk in the door?
Poland saw a decrease in independent bookstores and introduced a version of Lang’s Law last year. Germany seems to have survived fine with it, as this dispatch from The Nation suggests, though even then — as in France — we still read paragraphs like this —
… the annual volume of book sales — €9.7 billion in 2010 — has been declining and now stands at 50 percent. Direct Internet sales from publishers to readers account for 18 percent of annual volume these days. Sales through Internet bookstores are marching on: the annual share has grown from 8.9 percent in 2007 to 13.8 percent in 2010.
A theoretical law like this (or expansion of this to more than seventeen countries) could very well hinder the urge for bookshops to find profitability, but I’m not rushing towards a specific judgment or advocating anything specific here. I just want to start to introduce more context into the world of books, bookstores, price fixing laws, and the internet, and say, “What should our balance be?”
