Our rich and varied literary life is under threat from proposals for a new pricing structure on what we read.
By Philip Pullman
Every week we go to the supermarket and buy a dozen eggs. We expect them to taste and look pretty well the same as last week's lot. And we know that neither the hen who laid them, nor the farmer who collected them, had anything to do with deciding what price we should pay at the checkout, because that's the job of the retailer; and we know that the price will have been worked out by balancing such things as the deal the farmer had to accept, the price the customer is likely to put up with, the wages of the shelf-stackers, and so on. Buying eggs is a transaction that takes place so often that we can tell at once if the price this week is twice what it was last week, or how much less the supermarket charges than the corner shop.
But books work differently - though a suggestion being floated by some retailers and publishers would erase the difference, and make things very much more difficult for authors, and very much worse, in the long run, for the reading public.
The idea is that instead of being published with a suggested price, books should be published like eggs, as it were, so that the retailer alone would decide what to charge. But books are not like eggs. Every time we buy eggs, we are looking for the same thing we had last time; but every time we buy a book, we're looking for something different. So when it comes to looking at the cost, we have nothing to go by, at the moment, except the recommended retail price. A new literary biography, in hardback, will have a suggested price of
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