In the UK, deep discounting is making publishers see red. And why not, when they slot a book at a £20 recommended price only to see it slashed in half when it’s sold at Tesco or Asda. So as the Bookseller reports, publishers are starting to hit back by raising prices — to £25, even £30. And reactions, suffice to say, are decidedly mixed:
Toby Mundy, MD of Atlantic Books, confirmed that Atlantic was putting prices up “across the board”. “Our view is that premier non-fiction has probably been priced a little too low in recent times. Big books that were once £19.99 are now becoming £25. We are looking at prices more carefully than we ever have done.”
But retailers hit out at the trend. Sainsbury’s book buyer Emily Goldthorpe said: “To increase price points significantly without offering customers substantially more book isn’t justifiable. The key benefit is to the publisher, and some retailers will be disadvantaged–particularly those who are unable to discount to the levels that we saw from WHS and Waterstone’s last year.”
Terry Reilly, Bertrams Books CEO, added: “We think it’s unfair if publishers hike up the price of new titles to take account of retail discounting, while denying independent booksellers the same terms as they allow to supermarkets and internet retailers. This just stacks the deck against independents and strengthens the impression that books sold at r.r.p. are overpriced–which clearly they would be.”
And that, folks, is why the abolition of the Net Book Agreement may not have been such a grand idea after all…