Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The argument in favour of fixed pricing for books (an argument which I don't personally support, but I accept that it has a certain validity) is that the result of a free market in book pricing is the closure of small independent bookshops and, indeed, the British experience would seem to bear out the truth of that. In the days of the Net Book Agreement (the British fixed-price book arrangement) every town had its small bookshops. Within a few years of its abolition, they'd practically all gone. These days supermarkets sell cheap bestsellers, and there's only one bookseller still left - Waterstones, who have a shop in almost every town. Independent booksellers (other than specialist shops) are practically an extinct species. It could well be argued that this is too high a price to pay for the privilege of being able to buy cheap bestsellers along with your groceries.
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Actually that has much more to do with the fact that large supermarkets do not compete under free market conditions, but they have their business model subsidised. They are the ones, e.g, who take most benefit of the public highway system, but it's the taxpayers who bear the bulk of the cost of building and maintaining them. There would be much less incentive to build big supermarkets in the outskirts if the roads leading there had to be paid primarily by the big retailers.
Book price-fixing laws are an evil which is said to combat another evil, but it is clearly inefficient in doing so: there are still huge supermarkets selling cheap paperbacks because the transport subsidy is there, plus the small book shops don't have any incentive to compete against each other or together against the big chains. Those are two evils that we consumers have to pay.