Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
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.
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Good summation. The driving force behind all the mergers was that the overhead costs where starting to become significant enough that publishers could achieve significant cost savings by merging and cutting staff, just like every other industry where there are significant mergers. If I recall correctly, a lot of the publishing mergers were driven by the changes in the tax codes which caused a big increase in the cost of maintaining inventory.
I do think that with ebooks and JIT book printing, we may see a revival of the small publishers.