.. and it's part of the cultural policy in France (and many other countries). That law is one of the few things behind which the Right and the Left stood together to vote under Mitterand, and they did the same again in 2013 to amend it. It didn't come from the Left in 2013, it's the right that proposed the revision, accusing Amazon of illegal competition and dumping practices. It's dubbed by the papers "the anti-Amazon" law and it's not yet enacted, it's been submitted to Bruxelles, then the French government intends to submit it to their equiv. of the Supreme Court to validate its constitutionality (which is in doubt), fearing Amazon will contest it.

The 1981 law was successful, until Amazon, in stopping the decline of bookstores and of the libraire profession the French publishers and authors judge very important to the health and survival of French literature.

Initially it's the large surface, non-specialized stores starting to sell books virtually below cost, that is new released entertainment/popular literature only, that they sell mostly to people who read just that, that threatened the survival of the independent bookstores, small and big, and provoked a crisis among the publishers that were loosing their outlets to distribute the rest of their catalogs, making the publishing of creative literature in French less viable.

With the Lang law, it's the publishers that set a book's price, and the retailer can apply a maximum of 5% discount or increase to it. That made the Wall-Mart style companies stop selling books and stabilized the situation of the specialized bookstores, which was the goal.

After its success in France the Lang law has been imitated or has inspired similar laws in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Portugal, many South American countries and probably more I don't know of. Unlike France, they've adopted them mostly in the early 2000s when Amazon arrived. There's pressure for a similar law in Québec, faced with the same crisis in local publishing since the arrival of Wall-Mart, Costco and Target.

Amazon simply restarted the crisis in France - this time not in publishing (that don't suffer from Amazon) but for the book stores, and its French competitor FNAC rapidly followed its practices to survive its arrival (so far, with difficulty).

If the amendments to the Lang law are enacted, the online retailers would have to offer the book at full price but could deduce 5% of the book's price from their shipping fees. It means Amazon or FNAC would have to choose between the 5% discount or free shipping. In effect it would mean that getting a book online would be a bit more expensive than getting it in a bookstore.

This doesn't affect e-books, and this wouldn't affect books shipped by Amazon.fr outside France.

In any case, it has nothing to do after all with your original post. The European Amazon sites have shipping facilities in many countries that serve all of them (incl. four in France) depending on proximity of the goods' providers. Consumer service is also shared between European sites, and billing for all Europe is done through Luxembourg to avoid the other countries's fiscal measures, yet another bone of contention between the EU countries and Amazon.