Path: news.ccsf.jp!tomockey.ddo.jp!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nlpi057.nbdc.sbc.com!prodigy.net!news.glorb.com!lon-transit.news.telstra.net!lon-in.news.telstra.net!news.telstra.net!news-server.bigpond.net.au!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Jim Breen Reply-To: jimbreen@gmail.com User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.8-1.1.fc4 (X11/20060501) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: fj.life.in-japan,soc.culture.japan Subject: Re: Foreign book wholesaler Yohan bankrupt References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-2022-JP Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 44 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:44:43 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 58.161.8.235 X-Complaints-To: abuse@bigpond.net.au X-Trace: news-server.bigpond.net.au 1218455083 58.161.8.235 (Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:44:43 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:44:43 EST Organization: BigPond Internet Services Xref: news.ccsf.jp fj.life.in-japan:167440 CL wrote: > Jim Breen wrote: >>Practices like Yohan's are illegal in Australia. A pity Japan doesn't >>have real trade-practices/restraint of trade laws. > > Just about all publishing runs that way to one extent or another. Yohan > was just more ruthless than most, eventually forcing Tower Records to > toe their line, too. I don't agree that "all publishing runs that way .....", although some of it is nastily restrictive. Anyway Yohan was a distributor; not a publisher, so the usual "we have to look after authors" arguments simply don't apply. > Amazon nailed the lid on their coffin in record > time and the death was justified. > > Legality just depends on which dress it is wearing and who the fashion > critic is. Getting a non-top-100 book on the shelves of the average > bookseller is effing near impossible in *any* major capitalist country > for any non-mainstream publisher. And, if the topic is tripe, like most > of Debito's screeds, then the job is made doubly difficult. Good trade practices legislation combined with a properly funded and staff watchdog organization does wonders. It's not fashion; just a standard component of a well-run community. Debito aside (and I have been crossing swords with him since since he was an Aldwinkle), I realise my first-hand book-trade experience is limited to Oz and the UK, but I haven't encountered that level of difficulty in getting marginal books on the shelves. The problem with Yohan going belly-up is that bookshops might simply stop getting books from gaikoku. It's a marginal business in Japan at the best of times. While there are heaps of distributors all over the English-speaking world who could ship into Japan, I doubt any of them would want to go to the trouble or expense of setting up a Japanese presence. -- Jim Breen http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ Clayton School of Information Technology, Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学