I'm surprised there isn't more comment about this. It feels like the tremor before the earthquake. The agency pricing model effectively allows publishers to use any retail website as their own shop window, with a resultant control of resale prices. To my mind, that's not too far off the NBA. It also smells of hypocrisy. The publishing giants have fuelled the bookselling expansion of supermarkets and Amazon with enormous discounts in return for volume sales, only to now panic at the prospect of low prices on ebooks.
Where does it go now? Anyone want to set up their own website selling ebooks exclusively at publisher's prices and cut amazon, waterstone's et al out of the picture altogether (before it gets to court...)?

Selfish monopolist? It should be remembered that the current ranks of directors at Hachette are not the same twonks that enabled the massive discounting at supermarkets (though the discounting has continued due to the rather idiotic support through legal statute of 'free trade'). Tim Hely Hutchison is to be applauded for punching the schoolyard bullies in the nose. Authors represented by Hachette should count their blessings: other authors should be asking their short-termist publishers why they aren't making a stand. It should be remembered that Amazon and others are customers of publishing houses. As with any business transaction, it is the seller's right to refuse to sell and not the customer's right to buy that should prevail. Think about it: do you go into Tesco and tell Terry Leahy his beans are worth 6p and walk out? I think the staff in the store would have something to say about that...

While I can see why they would do this as Amazon's prices can be ridiculously low, it's still price fixing. The stumbling block with e-books is that most consumers already consider ebook prices too high with many still higher than the physical model, with VAT increases etc, we could end up in a position where ebooks cost more than physical books. This will ultimately be an own goal for Hachette as they won't send any ebooks. If other publishers follow suit it could stall the ebook market as people won't buy. It won't just be customers and retailers unhappy. All those ereader manufacturers will be pissed too. Why make a sonyreader if nobody is ever going to buy them because the content is too expensive? Although...Hachette might set the prices low. I doubt it. The people at the top never have a sense of reality until it's too late.

Do Hachette not realise that this move will bring in more pirate downloads. This move to price fix will damage ebook sales from Hatchette and in the long-term effect the authors royalties. as it stands, us consumers are having to pay near full price of a paperback, surely this smacks at money grabbing, even though production costs are considerably less for an ebook.
So we will now look at moving away from Hatchette published books and begin reading ebooks that are realistically priced. I am sure this must of occurred to them, as it stands the OFT should get involved to look at the price fixing.

How the hell is this even legal? It's not legal with physical so why with digital? This is not good for consumers in any way.

Hachette are doing the right thing; the big discounts given to the consumer by the likes of Amazon, the supermarkets and Waterstones come directly out of the publishers' pocket, and therefore the authors' as well. The authors get a percentage of the net profit, not the gross, so they lose out on discounting just as much as the publishers do. If the consumer had a say in the pricing of, say, clothes, it would argue that Primark are the ideal clothes retailer and that all clothes should be priced at that level, yet Primark are notorious for producing cheap, poorly-made garments in sweatshops. The prevalence of better quality shops in the rag trade show that the consumer doesn't necessarily want all their clothes to be cheap rubbish made by impoverished workers. The same should apply to the publishing industry. If some great books are only available at a higher price, the public will buy them. The fashion industry rightfully recognises that people will pay for what they want, it's just up to the publishers to do what they've always been there for, to explain to the public why they should want the books they produce. A few pounds here or there is not likely to ruin any consumer. This would be better for the authors both in terms of their royalties (and most e-book royalties are a higher percentage than physical royalties), and in terms of their publishers being able to afford better marketing and publicity, therefore being able to sell more books.

As for the price-fixing comments, that's just ridiculous. The price-fixing that's been going on has been done by Amazon and Apple, not by Hachette. If publishers take steps to prevent the insane discounting that has caused the downfall of highstreet bookselling, then they should be applauded. You could argue that selling a designer dress at

When this agreement landed on my desk last week was reminded of the conversations I had with music publishers 5 years ago. Music publishers were trying to grab as much control over distribution (DRM) and pricing in the hope it would then take longer for the market to take back control of things. A rather Pyrrhic victory as it turned out, it just created a boom in piracy.

Musicians are lucky, they can go on tour and earn money outside of album and single sales. I don't think tours and gigs will work for authors, but you never know, it could be fun.

The problems with the agency model really boil down to:

1) Price Fixing - illegal and highly suspect, not really in the consumers interest. I would say that at least 50% of emails to our customer services are "Why are ebooks more expensive than paperbacks, are you mad?". The next 49% are complaints about DRM and Digital Editions...

To be fair, the current book industry practice of having an RRP and setting a "discount from the RRP" pretty much dictates the selling price of a book based on perceived value to the consumer. It is all a bit arbitrary anyway.

As an independant, smallish bookseller, price fixing is actaully quite handy for us as it levels the playing field and we don't have to compete on price. But this is beside the point.

2) This agreement makes a retailer an agent. An agent tends not to have to run expensive customer service operations and has limited requirement to add value. A bit like an affiliate in the online world. Will Hachette (and others) provide a full customer service operation to support their "agents"? Why don't they just set up a glorified affiliate scheme and we just direct traffic to them and they pay us a commission that way?

Book Lover makes a very valid point about authors. They really do get a raw deal out the existing setup, but fixing prices is not the way to make it better, unless the same approach is applied to physical books (God forbid).
The cost price of a book to retailers should reflect a fair level of renumeration for an author, the balance being a fair assessment of publishers costs / profit expectations. Removing the concept of RRP and working off a basic cost model would be much more effective in protecting authors. Discount off RRP is a silly way of doing things and open to massive amounts of pressure from retailers. This is because is gives the retailer a yardstick by which to push for more of a discount. If they were presented with a set cost price non-negotiatable and allowed to price where they want it would be much fairer on the author and publisher. From personal experience it works rather well in most other retail industries.

In Waiting has the right of it. Go read it. Basically, ebooks are consignment items, so if the ebooks are sold cheap, the publisher and author get it in the nethers, very different than if the ebooks were bought by resellers like Amazon first. And:

"However much you poopoo the notion of profit, it remains what keeps publishers around and ensures that authors get published properly."

Too right, that.

Free market fundamentalism ultimately destroys everything in its path as we might just have seen in one or two other domains and the same will happen to books,publishers,authors and yes readers if the fundamentalists,electronic as well as every other genus, prevail.

Far from the end of the era of cheap ebooks it is the end of the era of control for the big publishing houses. True they still have exclusive control over the back-catalogue but future writers will be loathe to turn their back on the huge potential market that the internet presents.