The Swiss are still conflicted about legally mandating fixed book prices, and so it's one of five questions that will be up for popular vote in the upcoming 11 March referendum.
Martin Walker makes his position clear in a UPI piece, The threat to books -- arguing that:
At swissinfo.ch Urs Geiser and Sonia Fenazzi report on the upcoming vote in Buying Swiss books comes at a price -- noting also that:
Martin Walker makes his position clear in a UPI piece, The threat to books -- arguing that:
The question is simple: Should all bookshops be required to charge the same price for books or should the free market prevail, allowing large chains and supermarkets to sell books at big discounts that small and independent bookstores cannot afford ?Well, when you put it that way it does sound simple ...; in fact it is a bit more complicated (starting with the whole fixed-price idea, which actually isn't set-in-stone fixed, either; see all the (German) parliamentary documentation, which includes a link to a pdf of the law at issue).
At swissinfo.ch Urs Geiser and Sonia Fenazzi report on the upcoming vote in Buying Swiss books comes at a price -- noting also that:
Switzerland with its German-, French- and Italian-language regions has never had a uniform book price regulation. The small Italian-language sector has always been free, while the French-language and the main German-language markets repealed their price agreements in the early 1990s and in 2007 respectively.The Swiss media is already full of discussions of this -- and that looks likely to continue for the next two weeks.