Price and Peril
in Euroland
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JUNE 2002)
By
the end of February the 12 countries that have adopted
the euro had all come to the end of their transitional
period when old and new currencies could be used in
parallel. So the whole of Euroland is now well and truly
into life with a single currency. Except that the new
currency is turning out not to be as single as all that.
And pity the booksellers.
That’s because any product with a price printed on it
presents a new parallel problem. Booksellers in, say,
France importing titles from Italy or Spain, Portugal
or Greece, are liable to lose out if they stick to the
euro price on the cover. Importing books is usually
an expensive business, involving carriage costs and
bank charges plus, in some cases, a higher rate of VAT.
The extra costs generally amount to at least 15% of
the cover price, often 18%.
In pre-euro days, when exchange rates between EU member
states fluctuated, booksellers would either use a publicly
displayed conversion table, or calculate the price at
the till according to the daily exchange rate. Customers
rarely bothered to whip out their calculators to double-check.
But the term “single currency” naturally enough suggests
that a euro is a euro is a euro. So if booksellers in
one country are pricing 10-euro books imported from
another Euroland country at 11.50 or 11.80 euros, they
are laying themselves open to accusations of ripping
off the consumer — who has been bombarded by media warnings
to be on the alert for just such allegedly nefarious
practices.
Some booksellers are simply stocking up on felt tips
and blotting out the original price before replacing
it with their own. But that can spell trouble. Fortunato
Tramuta, manager of A la Tour de Babel, a
specialist Italian outlet in Paris, says that “not surprisingly,
there’ve been misunderstandings in the case of some
customers, who were expecting to pay the euro price
printed on the cover.” So what strategy has he adopted?
“We tell them about freight costs and so on. Secondly,
we’ve gone for a policy of being completely upfront
and have hung a big notice next to the till stating
that all books imported from Italy carry a surcharge
of 18%.” Complicating matters, for books published in
Italy, the VAT is paid by the publishers, so he can’t
claim back that 4%, though it is inevitably included
in the cover price. He can, however, claim back the
French VAT, which is 5.5% on books.
But booksellers stocking titles published in a number
of different countries can’t solve the problem with
a single notice by the till. “We thought the euro was
supposed to make things simpler,” says Linda McLeod
at London foreign-language specialist Grant &
Cutler, “but in fact we’ve had to open separate
euro bank accounts for each country we import from.”
As to what will happen when Britain eventually adopts
the euro, booksellers are already making the message
clear. “British publishers have been sounding us out,”
reports Tuija Partanen, an English-language buyer
in Helsinki. “And we’ve been telling them we don’t want
euro prices on covers.”
This
article is extracted with permission from a fuller report
on the euro rollout, written by Vivienne Menkes for
Publishing News.
©2002
Publishing Trends
