no book for you

Here's an interesting article from the NY Times comparing German and American book selling practices:

In the United States chain stores have largely run neighborhood bookshops out of business. Here in Germany, there are big and small bookstores seemingly on every block. The German Book Association counts 4,208 bookstores among its members. It estimates that there are 14,000 German publishers. Last year 94,716 new titles were published in German. In the United States, with a population nearly four times bigger, there were 172,000 titles published in 2005.

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.

Fascinating, right? We could examine all the different supply and demand curves, do some regression analysis, utilize all sorts of economics tools and come up with a great economic algorithm and do away with all the big box book stores!

Wow, I'm such a nerd. Here's a photo of Brett Favre holding his hands up in the air.

update: obviously I cannot recall all of my economics training but if you would like a new enterprise content management platform to support your web application development as well as create unifying information architecture and taxonomy structures then, shoot, give me a buzz.