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trades of the member countries are too alarmist. Fixed pricing is not an ideological subject. Every-where, the only strategy that matters is to increase the market. Everything else is secondary. The Ital-ian book market is smali and dominated by large companies both in publishing and distribution. This is less important than the fact that only 6% of the adult population buys 50% of all books. The remaining 50% are bought by 44% of the population. Therefore, 50% of Italians do not read. “That is what we should be discussing.” The sales of books are going down. Only publishers and booksellers can do anything about it, sińce the Government does nothing. Naturally, the Italian puhlic is inter-ested in discounts. Mondadori has had encouraging results from controlled experiments in price reduc-tion. Fundamental to any discussion on pricing should be a common determination to find new markets. Large distribution networks should not be iemonized but regarded realistically, without ideol-3gy, in order to find regional Solutions for everyone n the trade, including smali booksellers. Discounts ire one remedy, but not the only one.

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The impression left on the listener from dl the presentations tended to confirm Mr Ferrari s issertion that there is no European unanimity. li is i pity that there was no speaker from Scandinavia, Darticularly Sweden, which abolished price mainte-lance in 1970, and thus has a longer perspective :han the UK. The European Commission certainly aas a fixed position on fixed prices, but has not Jonę enough practical research, or engaged in Jialogue sufficiently to be able to justify that posi-:ion.

The task of benediction was left to that jloquent polymath of the book, Umberto Eco -ceacher, writer and author - who in his early days worked in both broadcasting and publishing. Only “he mass media, he said, talk about the death of the book, the death of the bookseller and the death of che author. They claim that we now live in a civi-lization of the image and that alphabetical civiliza-cion has disappeared. But we should not forget that one needs to read in order to use a PC. Putting a ref-srence book on a diskette is not the death of the book. Ir is a culturally advantageous change of format - less costly and occupying less space. However, the book in its codex form will not die. Like other basie inventions - the hammer, the scissors, the spoon, the bicycle and the corkscrew - it cannot be improved. The book was bom of two nomad civi-lizations - the Hebrew and the Arab. The new tech-nologies will help authors to publish at their own expense, but this will scarcely trouble booksellers.

The conundrum of fixed pricing in Europę is that there is no unified strategy on the book trade side and that the EC’s strategy is impregnably simplistic.

And even if the prestigious historie book-shops are disappearing, Eco is not honestly against the large emporia which offer practically everything in print, noi just new tirles. In the futurę, he sees both large bookshops and smali specialized book-shops, including antiquarian and representatives of smali presses. He recommends that the smali bookshops should be given tax cuts. Of course, Internet bookselling is a threat to both kinds of bookstores-“except in Ilaly, hecause rhe Italian postał services don’t work”. The most serious danger to society is too much information, from which books by their naturę are relatively free.

As for the author, the threat is supposed to be the hypertext - non-Iinear reading. But this is already normal for reference works, and every liter-ary work from Homer onwards is hypertextual in the sense that it continually refers back to things that happened in previous pages. It is stupid to envisage interaction whereby the user changes the authors text. On the other hand, something similar has happened in musie. Improvised jazz sessions have not been the end of jazz concerts. We should not make the mistake that the student movements madę in 1968 - thinking they could change events which had already happened. In books, the great elassies educate, moralize and teach us to live. They tell stories which we cannot change, and they will always continue to sell.

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