publishers hate amazon. bookstores, if any, hate amazon. the government of france hates amazon. etc. now, putting it mildly i was an early adopter, and i don't want to know how much i've spent there over the years. everyone always goes all jonathan franzen or nicholson baker or whatever and yearns for the time when one was browsing and making discoveries and talking to book enthusiasts at your local bookstore, if one ever was. but the local bookstore was good for some things and not others. probably a good spot to discover alice munro, say, and find people to enthuse about her with. but how many of them had even a half-decent philosophy section? and how many owners cared about stuff like that? the answer is merely 'not'. more or less they were all fiction heads who thought life was a story or whatever woolly jive people like that do believe. i used to go bookstore to bookstore, never finding the things i needed, or even anything i wanted, or even the very basic classics. mention this or that and they'd just look at you blankly. then i'd give up and maybe special-order it. they'd call me three months later, by which time i was on to something else. the idea that i could order any book in print and it would show up on my doorstep two days later seemed miraculous, and it has been extremely useful to me as a scholar: i can't imagine life without it now, really.
p.s. what the principles are by which french legislators operate, or what they take to be the scope and limits of their power, are matters incomprehensible. they'll yell 'liberte-with-an-accent!' and then arrest you for wearing the wrong outfit. if i were them, i'd drop their entire political tradition and adopt the british one, har har.
