Horizons widen with a book on a Parisian rooftop.
Barely a whisper
in Guilin, China.
“Books are a cultural
product and as such they deserve every protection we can give them” |
The price of books in recent
years has pitted small independent bookshops against the big chains, supermarkets
and the Internet. But what is in the customer’s best interest?
 The
end-of-year holidays are nearing. Imagine you have decided to give books as presents
to all your friends and relatives, who are interested in just about everything. The
decision is made, but where should you buy them? The standard choice is your local
bookshop. There you will probably find a professional bookseller who will be able
to recommend the most interesting books for each of your friends, tell the difference
between a paperback and a pocket edition, and order from the publisher or distributor
any book he or she does not have in stock.
If you live in France, Spain, Germany or any of the other six European Union countries
that have a single-price policy for books, it will cost you exactly the same whatever
bookshop or department store you go into looking for the cheapest price. And if you
are a good customer, the bookseller may give you a five percent discount, which is
usually the maximum allowed under the fixed-price laws.
This system is founded on two basic principles: that the same book should cost the
same wherever it is bought, whether in the centre of Berlin or the only shop in a
tiny Bavarian village, and that unlike shoes and clothes, the price will stay the
same all year round because seasonal discounts are not allowed. Under this arrangement,
the publisher usually sets the price of the book, giving the bookseller a profit
margin of about 30 percent.
But if you live in Belgium, Sweden or the United Kingdom (where book prices were
deregulated in 1995), you will find big differences from shop to shop because the
booksellers themselves can set the prices. Although this seems at first sight to
benefit the reading customer, the book trade is divided over it. In a world of disappearing
national borders, transnational authorities such as the European Union are therefore
seeking a degree of standardization which, while obeying the laws of competition,
is fair to everyone.
The advocates of the fixed-price system hold up Germany as an example. With its 7,000
or so bookshops and more than 1,200 publishers, it is one of the driving forces in
the print word. Or France where, unlike the film industry’s dependence on government
aid, publishing is self-sufficient. In both countries, all those involved in the
book trade—authors, publishers, distributors and booksellers—ardently defend the
fixed-price system. Similar attitudes can be found in Spain, where the government
has deregulated discounts on textbooks for the current school year, unleashing noisy
protests from writers, publishers and booksellers.
The French publishers’ magazine Livres Hebdo reports that in the United Kingdom,
where both systems have operated over the past decade, five years of deregulation
have seen the price of books rise 16 percent, far more than the nine percent rise
in the cost-of-living. One result of this, the magazine says, has been increased
book sales in bookshop chains and department stores, where the person who sells you
a book one day may be switched to the cosmetics counter the next.
Under a free-pricing system, the law of supply and demand will immediately affect
prices, since publishers mark up their best-sellers to compensate for losses from
the discounts handed out by supermarkets. The temptation becomes strong just to publish
things that will sell easily and quickly, with a resulting loss of diversity. Furthermore,
for every 200 books published there is rarely more than one best-seller, and it is
not unusual for these to keep on turning up in the catalogues of the same handful
of publishers—namely those who can afford to pay huge advances to the most famous
authors and buy the most expensive foreign rights.
“A system where there is competition over prices only works for the best-selling
books: the rest are seen as ‘bad quality’,” says Markus Gerlach, a German expert
on book prices. “This argument is quite unacceptable when it comes to a book of poetry
or an essay.”
Of course books are not the only products with fixed prices. In virtually every country,
cigarettes, medicine and newspapers are as well. “Books are a cultural product and
as such they deserve every protection we can give them, especially as they are now
threatened by things such as pirating and illegal copying,” says J. Ryba, who runs
a bookshop in Israel.
But let’s continue our book-buying expedition. If you have a credit card and an Internet
connection, you can order your books from one of the many online bookshops, which
will send the books to your home. You will probably have to pay the shipping charges
and trust the efficiency of the postal system, but the advantages are clear: you
can buy the books without leaving your home or office from businesses that are open
round the clock every day of the week. And in theory, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ Library
of Babel, all the world’s books are just a mouse-click away.
And what about the prices? Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book
in British author J.K.Rowling’s series which is enchanting the young and not-so-young
on every continent, costs 5.79 euros in France (roughly $4.80), 9.71 in Spain (for
the Spanish edition—it costs 10.28 in Catalan) and 14.31 in Germany, according to
data compiled at the end of October 2000 from various online bookshops. All these
countries have a fixed-price system, which does not necessarily lead to cheap books.
On the other hand, a book can cost less in Marseilles, where prices are fixed, than
in Brussels, where they are not.
Alongside supermarkets, actual and virtual bookshops, there is a third way to buy
a book. If you belong to a book club, such as France Loisirs in France, the Círculo
de Lectores in Spain or Bertelsmann Buchclub in Germany (all of which, incidentally,
are owned by Bertelsmann), you can get quite cheap hardback books to give as gifts.
But you will have to forget about the new Harry Potter book, the last winner of the
Goncourt Prize or a new revised translation of Don Quixote, since such clubs have
to wait at least nine months before they can offer the latest books for sale. Their
catalogues are slim too, because publishers are unwilling to take the risk of releasing
a book unless sales are pretty much guaranteed. Such clubs may sell carefully chosen
books quite cheaply, but they can prove an annoyance after a while because you have
to buy a minimum number over periods of up to two years.
Lastly, the other factor that can make your holiday purchases cheaper or dearer is
tax. If you live in Sweden or Denmark, book prices may not be very expensive, but
you will have to add a 25 percent sales tax, something that does not exist in the
United Kingdom, Ireland and Norway.
So what is the best way to buy your books? There is no single answer. Do you want
to give best-sellers, books about current affairs, reference books, original works
or translations? Do you want prose or poetry? Full or abridged versions? Complete
works or anthologies? Hardback or paperback?
Whatever price you pay, dear reader, the future of books is in your hands. Enjoy
them.
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