Madam, - Fergal Tobin of the Irish Book Publishers' Association (July 9th) is misleading.
Publishers negotiate different discounts on the recommended retail price (itself inflated to allow retailers to give discounts), with the big bookshop chains getting more discount than some wholesalers, and very much more than small booksellers. British publishers do better than they did when prices were fixed by the (now defunct) Net Book Agreement simply because of the additional publicity the discounts bring.
The vast profits of Harry Potter are due first to quality and then to the thimblerigging described above. Irish publishers compete only with great difficulty, and are beginning to lose the share of the home market that they so brilliantly built up over the past quarter century.
In the case of children's books (including those by Rowling's Irish rival Colfin) the Arts Council has chosen this moment to reduce grant aid. - Yours, etc.,
JEREMY ADDIS, Publisher, Books Ireland, Newgrove Avenue, Dublin 4.