Is Books are to be cheaper?

BOOKS are to be cheaper! It is hard to believe that anyone could be less than joyful at the news. People can afford to buy two books where before they bought one; some people who never bought books at all in the past may think to pick up a few with their supermarket groceries. Authors, publishers, booksellers, anybody who cares about literature and ideas or who worries about the decline in the habit of reading, should surely be dancing in the streets, joining Waterstone's in popping champagne corks or releasing balloons into the London sky.


Yet the mood in much of the publishing and bookselling trade - and particularly among what may loosely be termed the literary intelligentsia - is one of gloom and apprehension. Why? Because these people are suspicious of the consequences of a free market, and are right to be so. They may be wrong to mourn the Net Book Agreement, a form of price-fixing that has looked increasingly anachronistic. But they may wonder what kinds of controls will replace it and whether books will eventually fall victim to the free market's greatest weakness: that, while delivering what any single individual would rationally choose, its consequences may be a state of affairs that nobody would rationally choose.


And that is the important question for the book trade. It is all the more important because books, as Hamish McRae argued in the Independent last week, remain by far the most effective vehicles for spreading ideas. That books are now marketed for their designer labels, that celebrity status is now a better route to best-sellerdom than intellect or writing ability is beside the point. What matters is that other books are still published and sold; a fine Stilton is no less fine for being sold alongside a bland and sweaty Cheddar. Diversity - of authors, of publishers, of retail outlets - is essential to books. A society does not want its cultural tastes or its flow of ideas determined by the chief buyer for W H Smith or by Mr Murdoch's hard-nosed marketing people at HarperCollins.


The Net Book Agreement acted in favour of diversity because, put crudely, it protected weaker competitors (authors, publishers and sellers) by limiting competition. Almost certainly, it was unsustainable. And the pity is that those who write books, make them, sell them or love them have expended so much energy in arguing over it that they have hardly thought about what might replace it. Britain's monopoly laws are weak, and we know from the brewers, the supermarkets and the newspaper magnates how ruthlessly big companies will act to drive out the competition. Today, thousands of people will make a rational choice that they should go to Waterstone's and buy a cut-price Martin Amis. But the Government, which has an abysmal record in restraining monopolies, should be thinking now about how it could best respond to the all-too-likely outcome of those individual choices.