Book answer
I SUGGEST peace terms for the battle of the books. What we need is a Common Literary Policy. This would supersede the Net Books Agreement, which lets pub- lishers fix the sale price of their books, and is meant to stop Terry Maher of Pentos undercutting it. (Mr Maher means to undermine it and demolish it. I would establish a fund to intervene in the market, giving authors and publishers a guaranteed price for their books. They would be subject to quotas, and over-efficient pro- ducers (such as Jeffrey Archer) would be allowed to lie fallow and claim set-aside. The intervention fund would acquire a mountain of unreadable books, fit only to be pulped at a loss and converted to industrial alcohol. All this would be fi- nanced, via Brussels, at the public ex- pense. On all known form, it would impose a burden on taxpayers, leave authors and publishers grumbling, dam up the flows of supply and demand, and deny customers the chance to buy books at the market price. While we wait, we shall have to make do with the NBA, which is the next thing to it — a persistent attempt to tell buyers of books that price-fixing is good for them. Our airlines have the same idea, which is one reason why fares between London and Paris are twice what they are between New York and Washington.
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