German Border Threat: Cheap Books

Fascinating story overnight from Oliver Hartung for The New York Times:

FRANKFURT — In a tiny booth at the book fair here, the German publisher Heinrich Berenberg, a gray, slender, cheerful man, was chatting with Thomas Geiger, a middle-aged colleague in sweater and jeans. Berenberg Verlag publishes literary memoirs and biographies, about seven or eight a year. It is a four-year-old firm. Mr. Geiger oversees programming for a society called the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. He was recalling his childhood in a West German industrial town.

“It was in the middle of nowhere, only 20,000 steel workers,” he said, “but we could order any book in Germany and have it within a day. The whole post-fascist idea was that we needed books, along with universities and schools, to fix society.”
Petra Berenberg, Mr. Berenberg’s wife, who was also there, nodded. “I also grew up in a remote town,” she said, “and it was the same system that distributed drugs to pharmacies overnight. The books came with the drugs on the same trucks.”

Drugs for the body. Books for the mind and soul. If you want proof that a cultural divide separates Europe and America, the book business is a place to start. In the United States chain stores have largely run neighborhood bookshops out of business. Here in Germany, there are big and small bookstores seemingly on every block. The German Book Association counts 4,208 bookstores among its members. It estimates that there are 14,000 German publishers. Last year 94,716 new titles were published in German. In the United States, with a population nearly four times bigger, there were 172,000 titles published in 2005.

Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.

Now this system is under threat from, of all people, the Swiss. Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.

Read the rest of the story here.

Pic shows small Berlin independent bookstore, also taken from New York Times story.