Simon Jenkins is terribly excited by a new website where it is possible to pay full price for books. We share that excitement:

Good news from the high street. We don’t often read those words, least of all courtesy of the internet. The UK opening on Monday of the Bookshop website is a blood transfusion for independent bookshops and one from which all retailers can learn. The website is a mail-order circumvention of Amazon, selling books under the flags of more than 130 independent booksellers. Buyers order their book at a slightly discounted price after “entering” their chosen front door on the site and the shop duly receives the 30% bookseller’s margin.

Isn’t that good news? Not that we would recommend you use the site, nor that you don’t. It’s something entirely for you to decide for yourself. Which is exactly what provides the excitement in our little corner of the world.

Some of us are rather - from very to more perhaps - interested in what we ourselves have got to shell out to gain access to something, books being just an example of the larger point. Others of us are rather - from very to more perhaps - interested in the effects upon the provider. This leads to a certain bifurcation, in that some of us shop entirely on the cash price, others on the structure of the delivery system.

Of course, this changes at the extremes, very few indeed would agree that cheaper through the chattel slavery of book retailers is worthwhile - although there will always be a few - nor that £100 a volume is worth it to ensure a decent living standard for those who pack the boxes.

So, consumers have different desires, at least partially so, how best to accommodate that? Well, the only possible manner is that the different ways of achieving the goal - book retailing in our example - are tried out and we’ll see which best contributes to consumer utility. As we’ve already defined that utility as differing across people this insists upon our having many different methods of book retailing.

That is, this is all proof of the basic fact that it is free markets - the definition being that people get to try out different methods of assuaging that consumer utility - are the best possible system. Precisely and exactly so that those who wish to can pay near full price for their books even in the face of others offering greater discounts.

Isn’t that cool?