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Fixed or free? Europe’s book pricing debate

“The consumer must come first. The interests of publishers and bookshops are secondary to that.”

ambiguous. The “fixed” price is flexible in the sense that it is decided by the publisher. The market determines what price level is acceptable. For example, in France, art books in the price band from FF300 to FF800 have completely disappeared. Nobody was buying them. France had a brief expe-rience with free pricing from 1979 to 1981 and returned to fixed pricing under the Lang Law of August 1981. This Law reąuires that the selling price is fixed by the publisher and shown on the cover. Discounts of up to 5% are permissible. How-ever, the Lang Law does not cover institutional sales. Schools and libraries can achieve ad hoc discounts by negotiating with publishers. Also, retail-ers can reduce prices two years after publication. The French experience illustrates vividly what is the main obstacle to reaching agreement between the European Community and the book trades of its member countries: every country has slightly differ-ent ideas, while the European Union has only one idea - no fixed prices.

Following the French presentation, Volker Neumann, Managing Director of several Bertelsmann imprints and Chairman of the German book trades working party on trade publishing, related the pricing history of audio materiał in Germany as a warning of what could happen with books. Since the abolition of fixed prices in 1972, musie publishers’ business has gone down by 20%. The number of sales outlets for records and tapes went down from 10,000 in 1972 to 2,000 in 1998. Exactly the same thing would happen to book publishers and booksellers, Mr Neumann warned. No one has benefited from flexible pricing of musie media. What should have been an advantage for the consumer has resulted instead in a dangerous concentration among retailers.

At this point, Mr Willms observed that the Italian, British, French and German experience illustrated that the European book markets are not monolithic. Everyone survives by adapting their marketing to the local circumstances. But all markets have one thing in common: the need to find and develop new readers, both through book pur-chases and through library access. Recalling that French publishing is dominated by two large com-panies (Hachette and Havas), Mr Cohen-Tanugi pointed out that fixed prices are no guarantee against oligopolies. Mr Kaufmann was not cowed. The consumer must come first, he said. The interests of publishers and bookshops are secondary to that.

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The second day s proceedings were opened by Ulrich Everling , a lawyer who spent ten years as Director General of the German Federal Ministry of Economics. Co-editor of the periodicals Europarecht and Deutsches Verwaltungsrecht, Mr Everling has written extensively on the subject of price mainte-nance in Germany and Europę. In effect, he was defence counsel for fixed prices. He described the arrangements between Germany, Austria and Ger-man-speaking Switzerland, where book price-fixing has been accepted as an exception to the national antitrust interdiction against price-fixing. The publishers fix the prices. The booksellers adhere to them. So far, the European Commission has taken action only against such cross-border price-fixing, another example being between Belgium and France. In addition to the arguments already voiced by Messrs Neumann and Wóssner, Everling spoke extensively about whether price-fixing does or does not eliminate competition. His answer was that it limits “only the price competition for the individual book title”. Each publisher, he added, is in competition with every other publisher in setting of prices for all the titles published. Competition also flour-ishes in sales promotion and service.

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For Italy, Professor Alessandro Sinatra, author of Inquiry into the foreseeable conseąuences of ordered de-regulation in the fixing of bookselling prices on the structure of the publishing and bookselling sector in Italy, started his presentation with a table that showed Italy with the lowest per capita book pur-chase of all the member States. The culture has

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