Sigh. I suppose it was naïve of me to think that customers (little guy) could force a large company (big bully) to act fairly – in this case regarding their policy of anti-competitive ebook pricing. Yesterday I wrote that they were breaking the ACCC law that governs “Resale Price Maintenance”. I said I’d tell the ACCC and I did. To their credit, an ACCC rep got back to me today explaining the loophole (see below).

Alas, large companies must have lawyers to think up ways to tiptoe around minor issues like, say, illegal pricing laws.

In this case, Hachette Australia can engage in “agency pricing” in Australia, despite our laws that specifically forbid anyone offering a product to set the price it can be resold at.

Hachette Australia does it by not being a reseller. It seems Hachette Australia, which distributes its products (we’ll call them “ebooks”) acts as an “agent” of its parent company, Hachette Book Group. So it never technically has ownership of said ebooks, it just brokers the deals with the resellers/retailers on behalf of its parent, apparently.

So that means Hachette is legally allowed to require its customers – the retailers selling the ebooks, among them Borders.com.au – to sell them at a certain price.

You see the ownership transfer is only one step: Hachette Book Group (international parent company) to the online store.

Is this legal? Apparently, despite laws written specifically to stamp out such practises. You can see the reply from our ACCC below, explaining it all again.

Is it the way it happens in practice? Of course not. Hachette Australia are selling the ebooks to retailers as sure at the supermarket is selling you bread.

Is it smart business practice? Almost certainly not.

As I’ve mentioned before, it maintains a certain profit point for the publisher, but will drastically reduce the turnover of the books, because prices are kept high. It also alienates readers (read: consumers) who get pissed off at being taken for a ride. So they spend their money on the almost limitless other titles.

It’s a very cynical business practice, but I’m almost ambivalent about this now. Maintaining high prices for ebooks only hurts the publisher involved. If you buy the publishers’ line that they do it to invest in emerging talent, you may be more naïve than even I.

It also drives consumers to the places where they can buy directly from the author, which is the ideal.

So – wanna buy an ebook from an author?

From the ACCC:

The role of the ACCC is to ensure compliance with the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) (the Act), which is designed to encourage fair trading and discourage anti-competitive conduct through a specific set of competition and consumer protection rules.

One of the Act’s aims is to foster fair markets, that is, markets where normal competition can continue without being hindered by unfair and illegal market practices. Such illegal market practices include price-fixing, market-sharing, resale price maintenance, misuse of market power and certain forms of exclusive dealings/boycotts.

Section 48 of the Act prohibits suppliers, manufacturers and wholesalers from specifying a minimum price below which goods or services may not be resold or advertised for resale. This type of conduct is known as Resale Price Maintenance (RPM). It involves a supplier:

  • agreeing with a reseller that the latter will not advertise or sell below a specified price;
  • setting a minimum price at which resellers should advertise, display or offer their goods for sale or for the resupply of services;
  • inducing resellers not to discount, for example by giving special deals to resellers who agree not to
  • taking or threatening to take action against a reseller to force the reseller to sell the goods or resupply services at or above the minimum specified price, for example by refusing to continue to supply them;
  • indicating a price that is taken by the reseller as a price below which the reseller should not resell.

The key word in the above information is reseller. In the circumstances that you describe, Hachette Australia is acting as an agent for publishers rather than as a merchant. This means that Hachette Australia does not resell the products, but simply sells them on behalf of the publishers for a commission of the sale. In this instance the publisher is able to dictate what price the products are to be sold at as they retain clear title i.e. ownership of the book.

This situation is referred to as an “agency agreement” and as such it is unlikely that the conduct described will raise concerns under the Act.


2 COMMENTS

  1. – There must be _something_ that stops this loophole being used across the board. Presumably it’s that if you try to maintain title to a physical book, you run into physical problems – things like where the books are stored, or whose balance sheet the stock is counted against?

    “You see the ownership transfer is only one step: Hachette Book Group (international parent company) to the online store.”

    – no, that would still be two steps, because the book still has to be sold to a reader. I guess you mean it’s straight from HBG to the reader?

  2. The e-book itself is not sold. The e-book is licensed to the consumer by the publisher.

    In my (American, and not even a lawyer here) opinion, e-book sales is very much an agency arrangement. The booksellers don’t buy stock from the publishers and resell it like they do with paper books. The booksellers advertise the available e-book titles, collect payment from the consumers, deliver the e-books, and forward payment to the publishers.

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