Canadian Competition Bureau reaches agreement with HarperCollins
 

CBC News: Competition Bureau reaches settlement with HarperCollins for ebook sales.

Settlement is expected to restore retail price competition for ebooks in Canada.

The Competition Bureau says it has reached an agreement with publisher HarperCollins, which the agency expects will restore retail price competition for ebooks in Canada.

The outcome follows a bureau investigation that concluded an anti-competitive arrangement between HarperCollins and other ebook retailers led to higher prices for Canadian consumers.

The bureau said the consent agreement with HarperCollins follows similar settlements reached with Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Apple last January that permit retailers to sell the ebooks they publish at discounts.

This is interesting. I'd long assumed that the Aussie way was normal. Here, resale price maintenance is flat illegal, a prosecutable offence. Has been for years. (Of course there are doubtless lots of wrinkles I don't know about).

Books used to have a price printed on the cover and that was it. Then the law changed, and prices appeared as "recommended retail price". Then printed prices vanished completely. Imported books with pre-printed prices usually had stickers over the prices.

For instance, my 1972 Fontana paperback, printed in UK, of "Caravan to Vaccarres" has the legend: UK 30p Canada $1.25 Australia 95c New Zealand 95c South Africe 75c. (Love those prices.)

My 1973 UK paperback of John D MacDonald's "One Fearful Yellow Eye" has a similar legend, but there's an asterisk against the Australian price and the footnote: * (Recommended but not obligatory)

By 1980 my Dick Francis UK paperback "Reflex" has a local price sticker covering the legend, and the sticker reads "Recommended Only". (The price itself has faded completely from the sticker).

My 2007 UK-printed "Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" by Bill Bryson has no printed price anywhere, qualified or unqualified. The local shop I bought it from has its own sticker and price on the back.

I suspect periodicals are exempt: I doubt I could haggle over the price of the morning newspaper, which does have a printed price.

Note that none of this is coming into effect yet. Kobo is challenging the Jan 2017 consent agreements with Hachette, MacMillan, Simon & Shuster and Apple. That extends to the Harper Collins agreement as well.

The Competition Bureau website has all kinds of reading on this.

I can't blame Kobo for fighting. Without Agency pricing Amazon would likely crush Kobo in Canada. (Amazon is the only company I've ever heard of that the stock market routinely rewards for forgoing profit in favour of increasing market share.) I doubt Kobo could survive trying to match the discounts Amazon would be able to offer.