O'Reilly Radar's Peter Brantley has a great rumination up today about the economics of print publishing in Germany (where all new books , used, new, damaged or whole, have to be sold for the same price) and Switzerland (where this stricture has been dropped).
Here then is a meaty nugget, because it discloses that economic policy impacts not just the range of commerce in books that prevails within an economic zone (such as a country); economic and social policy also impact what gets read, and by whom. If one can take the question crassly, then it devolves to the consideration of whether should our economic and social policies encourage a diversity of reading, or encourage the greatest magnitude of reading.
It is easy to oversimplify this argument: a nation that through its economic doctrines encourages the development of an oligopoly of bookstores begets a readership of mass-market book consumers, vs. a nation in which multitudes of small bookshops thrive encourages the development of a richer cross-section of arts and science. Historically this has been tied up in questions of selection and curation: indies stock a smaller range of titles, but with either 1) greater in-store variation across the types of authors and publishers represented, or alternatively 2) deeper exposure of a specific type of literature (e.g. show me a B&N that can match the collection of City Lights in San Francisco, or St. Mark's in New York).
