Net Book Agreement - History

History

It came into effect on 1 January 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question. In 1905, The Times tried but failed to challenge the agreement by setting up a low-cost book borrowing club.

In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court, which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers.

In 1991 the large bookshop chain Dillons, followed by Waterstones, began to offer some books at a discount.

As the agreement did not cover books that were damaged (or second hand), shops that wished to sell "new" books below cover price for any reason (for example to get rid of obsolete stock or titles that were not otherwise selling) adopted a simple strategy which meant that they were still sticking to the terms of the agreement: they deliberately defaced or damaged the book(s). The two methods most commonly used were to either use a hole punch to punch a hole in the cover of the book or to use a marker pen to mark the edge of the pages. The marker pen method was the most common as it took the least effort.