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A fixed book price agreement (FBPA) is a form of resale price maintenance applied to books. It commonly takes the form of an agreement between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public. An example of an FBPA was the former Net Book Agreement in the United Kingdom. The key idea of an FBPA is to promote non-price competition between booksellers in order to promote the sale of little-known, difficult or otherwise culturally interesting books rather than catering only to blockbuster readers. To do so, an FBPA is deemed to ensure that the booksellers that provide the corresponding presale services are able to recoup their higher costs with a guaranteed margin on blockbusters. A related case is the existence of a fixed book price law (FBPL), where the book prices are kept fixed by law. An example of an FBPL is the current Lang Law in France. An FBPA/FBPL, with various provisos, has existed in some developed countries since the beginning of the twentieth century. It remains in force in roughly half the countries of the European Union as well as in some other countries. == Principle == The core idea of the FBP (either by agreement or law) is that a dense network of well-stocked, high quality bookshops is a necessary condition for the publication of a large variety of books, large variety itself deemed desirable for the cultural life of a country . Such bookshops have additional costs that are not borne by discounters, who just stock their shelves with the current blockbusters. Since the latter represent a large proportion of book sales, price competition between high-quality bookshops and discounters reduces bookshops' profitability. The FBP allows the publisher to mitigate this competition and thereby guarantees a sufficient margin for high-quality bookshops to operate. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fixed book price agreement」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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