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by rbehrends
4236 days ago
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This seems to be more a lesson in the difficulty of bottling a solution that works in one country and reusing it elsewhere. Because in France and Germany, the exact opposite happens: the profits of bestsellers are being used to cross-subsidize new books and new authors. This is in fact one of the rationales behind both countries having price-fixing laws: namely, to preserve the profit margin for bestsellers to make such cross-subsidies possible. You can argue whether that is fair (I know there are plenty of French and German readers who'd rather have cheaper bestsellers instead of books by new authors that they may never read), but both countries have a healthy book publishing industry. So, while this may not have worked in Israel, in France and Germany plenty of books are being published, bought, and read. In fact, Germany publishes more books per capita and year than the US, even though German publishers can't easily sell to the much bigger international English language market. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per... |
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The publishing market seems to vary quite a bit country-by-country judging by the comments here.
In the UK, we also had an agreement between publishers and booksellers called the Net Book Agreement [1] which set fixed book prices. The original defence of the agreement was that it subsidised important but less popular works. The Agreement was scrapped in 1997.
What effect did that have on the publishing market? For a start, discounts by online retailers and even supermarkets have altered people's expectations of book pricing. Most people simply don't expect to pay full price for new titles anymore. Many independent bookshops can't compete on price and have closed. However, the number (and variety) of books published hasn't declined - quite the opposite: new and revised titles have grown substantially according to the Guardian report below [2]. But some publishers feel there are too many titles being published and the volume isn't sustainable.
Books, magazines and newspapers are exempt from VAT in the UK. However, e-books are subject to full (UK) VAT rate of 20%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-mo...