It’ll never happen here, and it probably shouldn’t. But as the publishing business teeters ever closer to failure, with profit margins shrinking and sales declining, it’s interesting to look at the situation in Germany.
The Wall Street Journal has the stories in today’s paper. First, there’s one about Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Target putting a limit on bulk sales customers may buy of the deeply discounted books they’re now selling. At Wal-Mart, it’s two copies; Amazon, three, and Target, five. They suspect small booksellers of “scooping up” cheap copies and reselling them. Here’s the link.
More interesting is the companion article about Germany, where book prices are set. There, and in most of Europe other than Britain, bookstores and online booksellers must sell books at the price established by publishers. As a result:
Many in German attribute the country’s thriving literary and publishing scene to a system that outlaws the discounting of virtually all new books for 18 months. The system protects independent booksellers and smaller publishers from giant rivals that could discount their way to more market share. Along with 7,000 bookshops, nearly 14,000 German publishers remain in business. Many are of modest size, like Munich-based Carl Hanser Verlag, which publishes the work of this year’s Nobel laureate, German-Romanian writer Herta Mueller.
“The smaller publishers get to publish quality works they never could afford to do without the
fixed book price,” says Gerd Gerlach, owner of a small Berlin bookshop named after the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine. “Everyone benefits, not least the reader.”
And:
Defenders of the 120-year-old fixed-price system argue that prices of older books also are on average cheaper than in many other markets, since publishers and booksellers aren’t forced to make up for money-losing discounts on more popular books.
Price-fixing would never fly in the U.S., and I don’t want it either. But these articles do make one wonder about what might be.