Law of fixed book prices, revised and updated, shall enter into force in October – Digital Journal

From October shall enter into force the new law of fixed book prices, with more specific and detailed rules on discounts to practice the bookstores and sale of retail establishments such as hypermarkets.

ordinance now updated, published today in the Official Gazette, refers to the rules that booksellers have to meet when determining the price of a book and when they promote discounts, especially on works published less than 18 months.

Overall, the law is the same, but now is made a ‘comprehensive classification of prohibited practices “to prevent booksellers, bookselling network and other outlets make discounts higher than the price fixed by the publisher or importer, at a loss for the sector.

For example, it is forbidden to make a discount of more than 10 percent from the fixed price of a book, published less than 18 months in commercial initiatives such as “Pay one, get one” or “Pay two and take three. “

Each year, the bookstores have only 25 days to grant discounts up to 20 percent on books that have been published for less than 18 months.

document makes a distinction between “book fair” and “the book market” given the cultural nature of the first, and the definition of “book” includes the supports paper, digital and audiobook while remaining the differentiation of the VAT system to each of them.

This law was approved by Government in June and will take effect in mid-October.

In June, the president of the Portuguese Association of Publishers and Booksellers ( APEL), John Alvim, told the Lusa agency that the document “has regulatory areas of the law that were not clear, or there was no regulation, given the rapid commercial development of the market.”

In May, the Secretary of State for Culture, Jorge Barreto Xavier, told reporters that this update the law intends to defend small and booksellers and distributors average, to combat large commercial concentration and strategies that circumvent the law.

This issue of concentration commercial and unbalanced competition had greater prominence in 2013 when a group of independent booksellers forward with an injunction and a complaint with the Inspection General of Cultural Activities (IGAC) against the FNAC network and the Bertrand bookstores network, because campaigns . Christmas discounts that allegedly violated the law of fixed book prices

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