MANY British books will become a lot cheaper very soon in the Indian market. Anagreement that controlled the prices of books for more than 100 years was shattered lastmonth when three major publishing conglomerates Penguin, HarperCollins and RandomHouse walked out of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) between publishers and retailers.This withdrawal opened the floodgates as other publishers, anxious not to lose out on theall-out price war, also ditched the agreement.
The NBA had stipulated, inter alia, that books would be sold at the published price fora minimum period of six months f rom the date of publication and individual customerswould not be given any discounts over or under the table. With the N B A scrapped, thereis a free -for-all price war in the book world, with book-sellers offering ridiculouslyhigh discounts ( reportedly between 70 and 80 per cent) because the resale pricemaintenance is no longer valid.
People can now buy two books for the earlier price of one. Books like SalmanRushdies The Moors Last Sigh, M a rtin Amis The Information, EricNewbys A Merry Dance Around the World et al could be halved or evenquartered. Some bookshop chains are already selling the top ten paperback bestsellers at£2.99 with the promise that if the customer finds the same book cheaper elsewhere theywill refund the difference.
Yet, in spite of all the euphoria, there is gloom and apprehension among theintelligentsia in the publishing and book-selling world. There are three reasons for thisfear. First, can publishers really afford to give booksellers huge discounts? Second,would the big discounts be confined only to the more popular books or would they alsocover semi-educational titles and serious fiction like The Cambridge BeckettReader, V.S. Pritchetts Short Stories, The Best of Roald Dahl and so on?Third, will books finally become commodities like other disposables and be treated assuch? Given the mayhem in the book world, a literary critic has asked whether "bookswill eventually fall victim to the free markets greatest weakness: that whiledelivering what any single individual would rationally choose, its consequences may be astate of affairs that nobody would rationally choose".
After allowing for a 40 per cent trade discount and the cost of production,authors royalties, advertising and promotional costs, publishers are left with justa little over 25 per cent, provided all the copies of the edition are sold off. Ifpublishers have to allow higher discounts to the trade they would have to increase theircost-price ratios from 1:5 to something like 1:8; that is, a book which earlier cost Rs 10to produce and was priced at Rs 50 would now have to be priced at Rs 80.
Of course, there is another way: cut back on the publishing programmes. Alternatively,authors may be asked to pay for the cost of production for their books and accept anominal royalty for 500-odd copies. Very soon, books will become commodities of theentertainment industry on the lines of commercial T V with satellite and cable networks:20 and more T V channels offering nothing more than girls and game shows but very few thatwould mount a decent production of a serious novel or play.
Will the chaos in the British book trade affect us seriously? It would, for the simplereason that all the major Indian publishers are also importers of books. In other words,the Indian book business is a mix of both Indian originals as well as imported titles.With higher margins to be made from imported books now, the mix will definitely go infavour of imports rather than our own which call for heavy investments, high print runsand all the attendant risks of unsolds. But what might get imported in quantities will bethe down market of Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Sidney Sheldon, Robin Cook all theglitz, sex and sleaze that have become part of our daily consumption.
