Fixed book price

Fixed book price (FBP) is a form of resale price maintenance applied to books. It allows publishers to determine the price of a book at which it is to be sold to the public. FBP can take the form of a law, mandatory to oblige by all retailers, or an agreement between publishers and booksellers. An example of a fixed book price law is French Lang Law and the German Buchpreisbindung. An example of a trade agreement is the former Net Book Agreement in the United Kingdom.

The key idea of an FBP 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 FBP 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.

Fixed book price systems, with various provisos, have existed in some developed countries since the beginning of the twentieth century. They remain in force in one third member states of the European Union as well as in some other countries. Despite the name, most fixed book price laws and agreements actually set minimum prices, allowing sellers to deviate from a price set by publishers by a small degree. Thus they are only limiting price competition, not suppressing it entirely.