Net Book Agreement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British price fixing agreement between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.
It came into effect on January 1, 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question. In 1905, The Times tried but failed to challenge the agreement by setting up a low-cost book borrowing club.[1]
In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court, which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers.
In 1991 the large bookshop chain Dillons, followed by Waterstones, began to offer some books at a discount.[2]
In August 1994 the Director General of the Office of Fair Trading decided that the Restrictive Practices Court should review the agreement. In September 1995 several major publishers (including HarperCollins and Random House) withdrew, and in September 1996 the Booksellers Association decided to take no part in the case. In March 1997 the Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the Net Book Agreement was against the public interest. It was therefore ruled illegal.
The collapse of the Agreement strengthened large bookstore chains and reduced book prices. It also paved the way for the large supermarket chains to take a chunk of the book business, typically offering a small number of best-selling titles at deeply discounted prices. Small independent bookshops were severely affected: more than one in ten independent bookshops folded between 1996 and 2001. An early example of the changes in the book publishing markets following the termination of the Agreement was the entry of the US-owned booksellers Borders into the British high street, following their purchase of Books Etc. This was the first non-British company to enter the UK books market.
