The Great NBA Disaster
John Sutherland
Wednesday, 27 September 1995 was not a day lacking in newsworthy events. Arogue Japanese trader had out-Leesoned Leeson by losing a billion dollars on Wall Street without his employers noticing; Clinton had successfully, as it seemed, bombed the Serbs and blackmailed the Israelis to the peace table; Humphrey the missing Downing Street cat had been found. What the Times chose to lead with on Wednesday morning was BOOK PRICING AGREEMENT IS SHATTERED, with the explanatory sub-heading ‘Discount War Begins on Top Titles’ and an unflattering mugshot of Sir Kingsley Amis over the caption: ‘Book Likely to be Cheaper’.
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[*] The account of organised price regulation in the British book trade from which I draw here is given in James Barnes’s Free Trade in Books (Oxford, 1964).
Letters
Vol. 17 No. 21 · 2 November 1995
From Adrian Bowyer
In his piece on the end of the NBA, John Sutherland (LRB, 19 October) writes as if there were still such a place as abroad when it comes to buying books, and as if we could once again make it go away by agreeing that it isn’t there. If I want some books I click on http://www.books.com, select what I fancy from everything that’s in print and type in my Visa number. My books arrive in a parcel from somewhere or other (I presume on this planet) and my plastic gets charged a lot less than it would have been down the road under the NBA. And I don’t even have to go out in the rain.
Kurt Vonnegut once said something to the effect that, back in the old days when going abroad meant climbing up the hill to gawp at the foreigners in the next valley, we needed one storyteller for every few hundred people, but now that every published storyteller can speak to six billion of us we need fewer of them; however, we’re still made the same, so one in every few hundred people retains an inner compulsion to spend his or her life collecting rejections from publishers.
For the short term John Sutherland is right: the end of the NBA means more rejection-collecting. But soon anyone will be able to put their writing on their Web pages and have 50p drop into their bank account from anyone else (here or abroad) who decides to take a look. Most of the writing will be junk of course, but then most of what gets printed now is junk.
Adrian Bowyer
University of Bath
From Walter Have
John Sutherland, as befits a Northcliffe Professor, writes short, racy sentences and is entertainingly mad about the abolition of the Net Book Agreement. But it is hard to see what he is mad about. I have never had any difficulty in US shopping-mall bookstores, finding shelves of classics, poetry and good reference books and a paperback selection I would have a problem finding over here. I am sorry that small bookshops feel themselves threatened by the end of the Agreement. But that is still not an argument for price-fixing. When I order new American books by post from Mr Loeb in New York (no discounts) I get them in a week. Over here I waited four weeks for a copy of Jane Austen’s Letters. I tried to get a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo (reviewed in your current issue but published on 25 May) from four small bookshops. They had all ‘had one but it is gone’. They weren’t sure it was still in print.
Walter Have
Shepperton, Middlesex
Vol. 17 No. 23 · 30 November 1995
From Will Podmore
Has it occurred to Messrs Bowyer and Hayes (Letters, 2 November) that books need to be produced? The ending of the Net Book Agreement is a disaster for the publishing industry, for libraries and for readers. Books which students need will go up in price to offset the discounts on a very few books. A free market in books no more meets readers’ needs than a free market in health.
Will Podmore
Chief Librarian
From Warren Keith Wright
The authors’ likenesses featured on Barnes and Noble shopping bags, posters and coffee mugs are not, pace John Sutherland (LRB, 19 October), caricatures by the New York Review of Books’ David Levine, but faux-engraving portraits by Mark Summers, whose work is often featured in Opera News and the New York Times Book Review. Living in a region where the nearest bookseller (Bibles aside) is forty miles away, I would welcome any such imperialist outlet colonising Our Town.
Warren Keith Wright
Arbyrd, Missouri
Vol. 18 No. 4 · 22 February 1996
From Teresa Harley
John Sutherland (LRB, 19 October 1995) may be interested to learn that at least one newspaper already discriminates between areas of a country by the prices it charges for its product. The Observer published in London charges $5.25 to deliver its papers to the west coast of Canada, but only $4.95 to the east coast. Should Scottish readers of the Observer be on the look out for price increases?
Teresa Harley
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
