| Sumario: | While book retailers and publishers thrash out the pros and cons of removing printed r.r.p.s, authors are campaigning against abolition. Writers, with the full backing of the Society of Authors, the Association of Authors' Agents and the Royal Society of Literature, are going, metaphorically, to the barricades. Their cause is to reject the proposal to remove prices from all trade books. The supermarket system of "category management" allocates shelf footage according to turnover. Since the collapse of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, supermarkets and booksellers have been able to reduce the recommended retail price of a book by as much as they like, or even increase it. While there is little evidence of prices being raised, retailers cannot claim that they have no control over their margins under the present system. Removal of prices would prevent the public from knowing by how much a book had been reduced. INSET: The abolition of recommended retail prices-why authors ...
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