Dissolution of The NBA
In August 1994 the Director General of the Office of Fair Trading decided that the Restrictive Practices Court should review the agreement. In September 1995 several major publishers (including HarperCollins and Random House) withdrew, and in September 1996 the Booksellers Association decided to take no part in the case. In March 1997 the Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the Net Book Agreement was against the public interest and therefore illegal.
The collapse of the Agreement strengthened large bookstore chains and reduced book prices. It also paved the way for the large supermarket chains to take a chunk of the book business, typically offering a small number of best-selling titles at deeply discounted prices. As of 2009, 500 independent bookshops had closed since the demise of the agreement. An early example of the changes in the book publishing markets following the termination of the agreement was the entry of the US-owned booksellers Borders into the British high street, following their purchase of Books Etc. This was the first non-British company to enter the UK books market.
However, market concentration and a demise of independent bookshops have also taken place in economies such as Germany and France where a fixed book price agreement is still in place. The loss in small business was smaller than predicted by many commentators and the number of titles published in the UK has increased despite claims to the otherwise when the NBA was dissolved. Also, the volume of books sold in the UK has increased by about 30% between 1995 and 2006.
Read more about this topic: Net Book Agreement
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“The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)