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Casalini

already been damaged by oligopolies which govern both publication and distribution of books. Con-centration on bestsellers is already inhibiting the discovery of new authors.

Defending price Controls in Italy, Profes-sor Sinatra pointed out that the average book price has dropped in the past few years, while the number of titles and the size of print runs have increased. Stimulated by competition among publishers, these trends can only stimulate Italy s Iow readership market. Price deregulation would only help the oligopolies, and Italian culture would suffer further impoverishment. There would be a drastic reduc-tion in the rangę of titles available and conseąuent closure of traditional bookshops and smali publishers.

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The next speaker was Alan Giles, Manag-ing Director of Waterstones, the UKs most suc-cessful bookselling chain, recently united with its competitor Dillons under the ownership of EMI. His message did not bring comfort to the propo-nents of fixed prices. Its all OK so far, he said, but it is only two-and-a-half years sińce the Net Book Agreement collapsed, following 100 years of fixed prices. There could be a delayed reaction. However, Mr Giles firmly believes that discount is nor a sub-stitute for book promotion and that the book market is not very price-sensitive. The NBA had survived so long in the UK only because publishers supported it. (In fact, they defended it passionately under the rubric “Books are Different”, which was the title of the tome recounting their victory in the Restrictive Practices Court in 1962.) Latterly, the NBA had also been used as an insurance against the imposition of Value Added Tax, the UK being the only country in Europę where books are rated zero. The result was a stable book industry, but one in which the number of titles had grown a lot faster than the sales, with the result that neither publishers nor booksellers in the UK were particularly prof-itable.

The end of the NBA was signalled in the early 1990s when two publishers abrogated it and said their books could be freely discounted by retail-ers. Few of them did. “Further pressures” arose in the next few years. The Government again asked

the Restrictive Practices Court to examine the } legality of the agreement, and the book trade paled at the thought of legał defence estimated to cost £lm. Mr Giles curiously did not mention the cam-paign against the NBA conducted by his former competitors Dillons. But he did mention supermar-kets and confirmed that W H Smith, which was until recently Waterstone’s parent company, had staunchly supported the NBA but in the end had aided its fali or collapse by entering into price pro-motions with two major trade publishers (Harper-Collins and Random House). This was followed by “a short-lived boost to trading”. Morę books were j sold, but sales income did not rise correspondingly. “Non-traditional outlets” (mainly supermarkets) did begin to buy books, but, in Mr Giless opinion, “the market changed little in its dynamics or character.” The only measurable change (confirmed by Mr Newton) had been the increase in cover prices to enable publishers to give morę discount. While hook chains and supermarkets had gained market share at the expense of independent booksellers, there has not been “a widespread closure of inde- j pendent bookshops as many people had feared”. • Returns to publishers have been reduced, but mainly because they have insisted on firm sale when making price promotion deals.

Broadly speaking, Mr Giles mnnaged to j give the impression that price-fixing did not matter , too much one way or the other. Booksellers such as Waterstones, he implied, were too sensible to discount heavily. The total sales under discount varied from 1% of all books sold to perhaps as high as 6% j at Christmas. He was the first speaker at the confer- | ence to refer to the US experience and credited the establishment of Waterstones first superstore to ideas that he had seen in America. Certainly the market share of independents in the US has declined markedly sińce the advent of the superstore. The arrival of Borders, and the possible arrival of Barnes &. Noble, in the UK, with the likelihood of across-the-board discounting, would further harm independents. He labelled this as “Armageddon” and forecast that it might lead to the imposition of Value Added Tax and “further concentration in both retailing and publishing with the conseąuent destruction of the cultural values which are important to all of us working in the industry”.

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