France has a law in place, established in 1981, that requires all booksellers in the country — big-box stores, independent stores, online retailers — to sell a given book at the same price as all their competitors. (Stores can do some discounting in order to help move stock, but the maximum discount allowed is 5%.) Chad Post at Three Percent writes of the effect this law has had on book culture in France, and it’s a lesson we’d do well to emulate (as if): there are no price wars, publishers can set prices based primarily on internal costs, and it has encouraged diversity in publishing.

Post notes that diversity in publishing, to French publishers, means “the publication of a broad range of titles, including books that have very little chance of selling, but are culturally valuable. Like poetry. Or, uh, translations from languages other than English.”

Post continues:

The fixed book price law has prevented France’s noble book culture from devolving into the quasi-cesspool that we have here in the States, where celebrity “books” are stacked miles high and offered for 45% off, and people read a lot of crap (but not always) because it’s cheap and everywhere. Our book landscape is like a 180 to France’s: Whereas the French state that “books are not a commodity like any other,” a huge proportion of businesses and business people in America tend to see them as exactly that — a commodity plain and simple.

Speaking of which, remember Richard Nash’s thoughts on a study of books as a commodity in the US? It would seem that Nash, an experienced publisher, was actually startled by the recognition that books have always been treated thus in the US.

Post concludes:

I’d love for the fixed book price to exist in America. But introducing that into a congress incapable of getting us health insurance is as likely as building a bookstore on the moon. But one can hope…

The full blog post is here.