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.
