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.
Read more about this topic: Net Book Agreement
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)