In Germany we have a law that prohibits rebates on books. The prices are usually printed on the back. Selling books discounted is prohibited and may lead to huge penalties. (Of course there are loopholes, damaged books can be sold for any price and books can be damaged by stamping "DAMAGED" on them.) This eliminates pricing competition and will probably give the local booksellers a few more years to live. However: Amazons margin on books is probably the largest ever realized countrywide. Book wholesalers have the contractual right to get the largest discount granted to any customer. This is why basically no-one gets more than 50%. Except Amazon. They'll buy from wholesale, but the book will need 1-2 additional days to ship. To get 24h shipping, the publishers have to sell directly to Amazon at 50% rebate plus around 15% for handling and advertising. This way they realize lower sourcing costs than anyone else. It's ridiculous, but many agree to it.
Hmm, I got 24h shipping in basically every German bookstore way before amazon arrived on the market (to the store, of course, not to my home address). Did that change in the last few years?
I think one of the big factors of amazon right from the start in Germany (and probably Austria and France, too, both of which have similar price laws) was that you could get the books to your own address, and that pretty quickly. That combined with the browsing experience (part of which was the novelty) got them established, and later on the expanded product range and the recommendation engine cemented their foothold. So I would say it's not all just about the price, although I'd be very interested to hear about pricing arrangements with the publishers, especially in the early years where they didn't exactly dominate the market.
To me, the biggest boon of amazon was getting English books easily and without a big markup (straight USD/EUR rates, not some fairy tale wiggle factor). Programming books were quite a bit cheaper (German books were almost always hardocover only, and with a fixed price, of course), never mind novels (ages to translate and almost every trilogy becomes a hexalogy in German).
There is also one main difference between US and German book market.
Ordering a book in US took two weeks or even month, to ship the book to Boston, before Amazon disrupted the broken US book market. While ordering a book in Germany takes a maximum of two days to any bookstore.
One thing the article does not mention is the real price of ordering a book at amazon: Privacy. There had been lots of cases where CIA or FBI visited people because of the books the bought.
Unless you're paying cash for books and not using any sort of membership/discount card when you do, your privacy is just as gone at a physical bookstore as it is at Amazon.
Not necessarily; in most cases I would imagine only the book store themselves retain data about your purchase (details of the SKU(s) you purchased, images of you making the purchase on CCTV, etc.)
If you use an electronic payment method, only 'metadata' — to use an expression in vogue — about the transaction will be transmitted to third parties, not the details of the particular item(s) you purchased.
