Time to bring back the net book agreement?
The free market was supposed to invigorate book publishing after the death of the net book agreement, but it hasn't worked out that way
Supermarket sweep ... discounting drives threaten traditional bookshops
Last week, in an article about the struggles of mid-list authors, I made a passing reference to "the glory days of the net book agreement". A poster called Pikeman didn't like that. "You will excuse me if I don't see a price fixing cartel as something to be mourned," he wrote. So it seems that not everyone thinks that the destruction of the net book agreement was A Bad Thing. Although, I struggle to see why.
For those that don't know, the net book agreement (NBA) was a cosy arrangement put in place in 1899 to allow publishers to set the retail price of books. The big houses agreed that they would collectively refuse to stock anyone that tried to discount – not that they had to act very often because most retailers thought that the system worked in their interest too. The restrictive practices court examined the NBA in 1962, but declared that it was certainly in the public interest because it allowed publishers to subsidise works of important – or potentially important – authors.
By the 1990s, things had changed. The free market was in full swing, chain bookshops dominated the high streets and the only acceptable definition of public interest related to price. Terry Maher, the head of Dillons, made it a personal mission to have the net book agreement torn up. He forced the publishing industry into endless legal wrangles by discounting leading titles, wrote strident articles about "this outdated restrictive practice" and dedicated vast resources to destroying it. He won. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall – or perhaps lured by the thought of quick profits from the supermarkets – publishers, led by Reed and Hodder Headline, began to abandon the arrangement. The final nail was put into the coffin in 1997 when the head of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) had the agreement declared illegal at the restrictive practices court. Now, it seemed, it was no longer in the public interest.
Since then, the demise of the net book agreement has been regarded as a fait accompli. Who would want to argue with our justice system, after all? Even if the man who led the case for the OFT was Sir Bryan Carsberg – who won the "Sir" in 1989, largely for services to Thatcher's privatisation policies. Even if the judge at the case was Sir Francis Ferris, who had previously been the leading counsel for, erm, the OFT.
And even if only one person from the publishing trade bothered to fight the OFT in court.
That lone voice belonged to the heroic John Calder, publisher of Beckett,William Burroughs and Henry Miller, among others. Calder branded thePublishers Association "craven, foolish, ignorant, suicidal" for failing to fight against the ruling. He predicted that independent traders would quickly start to go under, then that the large chains who had advocated the destruction of the agreement would start to fail too and then that publishing would be in a hell of a mess. He was right.
Maher, in contrast, had claimed that independent booksellers would remain "in good stead". He said that abolition would "widen the market for almost all kinds of book". He thought bookshops would benefit from "secondary purchases" even if they made less on the books that they had to discount. He was wrong.
Maher simply didn't foresee that people would no longer go into bookshops at all. That supermarkets would stock booksellers' metaphorical bread and butter as loss leaders – making the "secondary purchase" a carton of orange juice instead of a skilfully crafted mid-list novel. His mistake has been our loss.
Since the NBA disappeared, 500 independent bookshops have closed. Borders has swooped on to our high streets – and then ceased trading. Dillons is a distant (bad) memory. The market has narrowed. The shelf life of most novels is far shorter, as are the careers of most writers. Statistics tell us that more books are published – but most of those are self-published or sold by tiny firms with next to no marketing push. The real story of the industry is the slashing of lists, mergers, collapses, buy-outs, sackings and losses on a scale never before witnessed.
Now, instead of a cartel, we have a virtual monopoly. An agreement that enabled dozens of publishers to set prices for thousands of booksellers has been replaced by a system that allows two or three big organisations to dictate all. Waterstone's book buyers, rather than the book-buying public, decide whether a book succeeds. Supermarkets tell publishers what price to sell at, how many copies to print, what to put on the cover, what to call books and even what to put inside them.
Not all of that can be blamed on the loss of the NBA, of course. But a healthy portion of it can. It's probably now harder for good writers to get into print – and definitely harder for them to receive the long-term support from publishing houses necessary to nurture their talent. Literature remains one of Britain's biggest exports – but for how long? All of which prompts the question: would the public interest be served by bringing back something like the net book agreement?
It's an increasingly interesting debate – especially given the battle that Macmillan has just undergone to prevent Amazon dictating the price of ebooks. Is it better to have a thriving independent book sector and broad range of titles than a few cheap bestsellers? Our French cousins came to that conclusion in 1981 after an abortive attempt to destroy their NBA equivalent – and their bookshops have weathered the storm far better than ours.
Obviously, this is all pie in the sky. The spectre of online copyright theft would loom too large over any attempts to set reasonable prices. Hoping that our new Tory overlords may admit that the "free" market has made something worse is probably as crazy as expecting a decent train service. But, then again, a change is at least worth considering. The current situation is looking increasingly untenable, after all. Over to you.
Πηγή: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jun/17/net-book-agreement-publishing
