Brief Book Regulation Primer
Letters
Brief Book-Price Regulation Primer
This latest adventure isn’t directed against exclusionary practices but fosters concentration in publishing and distribution and is contrary to the public interest.
June 4, 2014 2:25 p.m. ET
Regarding L. Gordon Crovitz’s “The Antitrust Book Boomerang” (Information Age, June 2) and Holman Jenkins’s “Washington vs. Books” (Business World, April 14, 2012): Our antitrust agencies are populated by simplistic people who underwent an intellectual epiphany when they first beheld a demand curve, and who are alarmed by such refinements as transaction costs and information costs.
American publishers have lived in terror of antitrust suits since a case in 1915 when R.H. Macy & Co. was rewarded for its admitted use of a handful of best-selling books as loss leaders with a multi-million dollar verdict in its favor. Since the courts eviscerated the Miller-Tydings and Mc Guire fair trade acts in the 1950s, serious current bookstores have disappeared, followed by serious unsubsidized editing and publishing. There are best-sellers and books selling 1,000 or fewer copies and little in between.
The British Restrictive Practices Court vindicated book price maintenance in 1962, though its judgment was undone in 1997. The earlier judgment declared “it is improbable that there are many mute, inglorious Miltons about, but the chances of their muteness will be increased if publishers are constrained [by price cutting] to be less adventurous.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1911 urged that “businessmen should be left free to do their own business in their own way, save where the ground for interference is very plain.” This latest adventure isn’t directed against exclusionary practices but fosters concentration in publishing and distribution and is contrary to the public interest in publishing industries as defined by the Supreme Court in the Associated Press case (1946) and recognized by most nations on the European continent–the “widest possible distribution of information from diverse and antagonistic sources.”
GEORGE W. LIEBMANN
Baltimore
Posted in: Culture Wars, Education, Markets and Privatization, Regulation