College stores throw the book at Internet vendors

NETTLED THAT ONLINE VENDORS are selling books to consumers at costs that undercut even their wholesale rates, college bookstores in August stepped up an investigation into whether publishers are illegally privileging online direct merchants. While the National Association of College Stores (NACS), which represents college booksellers, refused to cite names pending completion of a probe by a Washington law firm, its accusations represent an escalation in the triangular dispute among publishers, campus book vendors, and Internet merchants.

"Over the past two years, we've had a large number of complaints from our members," says Jerry Buchs of NACS. He claims that by offering greater discounts to Internet vendors, some publishers are violating the Robinson-Patman Act, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and aimed at ensuring the survival of competing businesses by barring manufacturers from offering discriminatory discounts to certain vendors. Buchs says that among two hundred responses to a survey recently conducted by NACS's attorneys, "a handful" of publishers admitted to offering differential discounts. For now, Buchs says, NACS is deferring judgment on legal action against publishers.

But in 1997 NACS sued three publishers, Addison Wesley, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, over what it claimed was "dual pricing." The suits were all settled separately by early 1998 but signaled campus booksellers' willingness to fight to hold onto their market share in the lucrative college textbook market, where annual sales top $5 billion.

Even as college stores lambaste publishers for allegedly favoring Internet vendors, they are scrambling to relaunch a nationwide Web site of their own, , which aims to offer the holdings of several hundred individual college stores. Buchs says that 150 of his group's member stores are already participating in the site.