Fixed book price

To do so, an FBP is deemed to ensure that the booksellers that provide the corresponding presale services are able to recoup their higher costs with a guaranteed margin on blockbusters.

The development of competition policy in the 1970s led to a wave of repeals of those agreements (Australia 1972, Sweden 1974, UK 1995) at a time when any form of resale price maintenance was seen with much suspicion.

More recent work has found positive effects arising from FBP policies, based on a cross-country examination of European nations.

By cancelling the possibility of price competition, a FBP makes impossible this kind of opportunistic behaviour and induces both retailers to compete in services.

His conclusion, supported by elements from (Fjeldstad 2001), is that the effects of a FBP are less than both proponents and critics make them, and that other institutional agreements (e.g. only pure bookshops can carry textbooks in Norway) better explain the evolution of the book markets in those countries.

He notices however that the former stayed in place where a quality-sensitive demand existed, and that competition between bookshops spurred a reduction of operational costs thanks to better logistics and collection management (an argument also found in (Ringstad 2004)).

In a counterfactual manner, (Rouet 2007) shows that in France, the FBP helped to maintain a dense network of independent bookshops, reined in the deployment of chain bookstores and spurred supermarkets to boost their offer of books.

Comparison with France show that the FBP leads to an increase of the price of bestsellers relative to non-FBP markets and a decrease of low-selling or long-selling books.