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Is it still price fixing when the competitors are not selling the same product? Is a publisher who sells Stephen King books selling the same product as a publisher of John Grisham? Because each author's work is generally only provided by one publisher, I guess the publishers would argue that they are not selling the same product as their competitors, therefore no price fixing is involved.
In the UK we used to have a Net Book Agreement which fixed the price of books in shops (any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question); this was deemed illegal in the 1990s because it was anti-competitive, and I would imagine the same would apply in the UK to any "agency" agreement such as now been set up in the USA.
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