Unity Books do the maths on book prices

PANZ News
Following the recent debate on RRP’s, particularly when books have their UK price printed on the back jacket, Unity Books Wellington decided to investigate book pricing. Two booksellers - who happen to also be commerce students nearing the end of their degrees - worked on the project with Tilly Lloyd. Selina Kunac, special orders, originated the titles from Unity’s lead July titles, and Courtney Smith, buyer of international titles, produced a price comparison spreadsheet.

“Looking at the spreadsheet as a whole, there is not a lot of difference between the publisher/agencies involved,” the number crunching students found. Unity then sent specific results to each publisher involved, asking for their factors in pricing books for New Zealand.

Unity’s report ultimately concluded that NZ RRP’s ‘do not have a lot of fat in them.’ “Competitively fair pricing has always been vitally important to indie and group viability, and it is amplified now with the growing online offshore consumer culture,” Tilly notes.

Read the full report here.

“I welcome the researched and business-like paper from Unity,” said PANZ Immediate Past President Kevin Chapman. “It matches the work I did about three years ago comparing the actual landed cost from overseas sites to the average selling price on Bookscan of the same titles in NZ.

“The appearance of ‘high retail prices’ comes from two factors. One is the GST issue, and it continues to confound most of us that our government would give a business advantage to retailers who pay no tax here and employ no New Zealanders. Publishers are behind the retailers’ campaign to bring fairness to this. The second is the ability of UK website retailers to avoid freight cost because of their arrangement with Royal Mail. When you can remove a substantial external cost, you can easily make everyone who has that cost look expensive.

“NZ publishers and distributors are not getting rich at the expense of NZ retailers, but overseas internet retailers are. And it is time the government did something about it.”