The Net Book Agreement

One of the many temp jobs I did was at a local print works about ten or so years ago. They needed some extra pairs of hands with a huge print run of magazines. It was all very clean, light and airy and the work wasn't too strenuous. Pick this up, put it there, and so on. There were frequent stops while they worked on the machines and our small gang of temps were moved around the works as required. All in all an interesting couple of days for a couple of reasons.
It wouldn't have happened at all a few years before that. The printing trade was 100% unionised and any non-union labour would have had them out on strike. We can all remember the scenes in Wapping when News International moved production of their papers out of Fleet St.

I drove past the site of the print works the other day. It is no more. The buildings are demolished and the concrete floor is a car park for the local hospital workforce. The other printworks where the local paper was edited and printed was knocked down about fifteen years ago and production transferred to Northampton. It's inevitable that that print works will also close as more and more people get their news on-line rather than from a newspaper.

I thought about this as I was browsing Ebay looking for books by a particular author. This week it's Kurt Vonnegut. I have a dozen or so and I'm looking for more of his books to take on holiday. As I browsed the lists I thought about the Net Book Agreement, which was in force when I managed Volume One Books in Northampton twenty years ago.

According to Wikipedia
"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed Book Price 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 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."

I was made redundant in 1994 when the Goldsteins foresaw the end of the NBA and put the company into administration. The new owners and I didn't see eye to eye about how the books were ordered, etc and I was made redundant. I was happy to go. Within a few months the Net Book Agreement was no more and Sunday Trading had been forced through. My employment contract would have been changed for the worst. I was glad to go.

I was a firm believer in the Net Book Agreement. Books are not baked beans. You don't read your Dan Brown or Nick Hornby or whatever your favourite author happens to be, and then pop down the supermarket for another one. Each book is unique. They take time to write. The most prolific authors only manage about three every two years. They are a premium product.

So why pile them high and sell them cheap? Why reduce your margin and even sell them at a loss? Waterstones opened at midnight to sell Harry Potter at half RRP.
Two things. Either the RRP was wrong or they sold it at a loss. All that work , all that expense, all that aggro and they sell it at a loss. They're mad.
Secondly, the books were printed in China and shipped over by the container load.
Hardly any books are printed in the UK now. Since the NBA was scrapped the publishers can't afford to. So all those printer's jobs are gone forever. When they close the print works or shoe factories the machines aren't scrapped. They're sold, boxed up and sent to factories in the far East where they are used to print books or make shoes that are sold back to us.

Cheapest is dearest. Always.