Interesting news item from The Bookseller today. It’s such a mix of valid and to me misguided thinking.

On the one hand they ask the most pertinent quetion of the next few years: Do We Want To Live Without Bookstores?

Yet on the other they seek to retain their protected status and fixed prices something I’ve never really been a fan of.

The petition, entitled ‘Does Hachette Livre want to do Without Booksellers?’ and reported by the French trade weekly Livres Hebdo, says the joint advertising campaign by Apple and France’s

largest publisher to promote the launch of the iPad in France on 28th May was considered by booksellers “as a sign of great disdain”.

The agreement between the two undermined “the need for publishers to fix retail book prices and resistance to the risk of domination or a quasi-monopoly by one or two large American distributors that impose their terms”.

via French indies sign petition against Hachette’s iBookstore agreement | theBookseller.com.