Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Agency pricing is not per se "illegal" but may well be in breach of competition laws, as it plainly seems to have the effect of destroying competition.
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The purpose of agency was to prevent books overall from being cheapened in the eye of the public. That was the conspiracy. There was no conspiracy to harmonize the amounts paid as advances, or sell titles from different publishers at the same price.
Now, price maintenance schemes such as agency do reduce competition between retailers. But agency didn't destroy competition between Penguin and Bertelsmann, or Hachette and Perseus. What destroys competition between the publishers is mergers and acquisitions. This is especially true of the Penguin Random House deal, since, more often than with Hachette and Perseus, Penguin and Random House might have been bidding on the same book.
If I ran the world (not a good idea), I would give the publishers agency in return for banning mergers.