Celebrity authors Vikram Seth and Monica Ali are among the signatories to a writers' petition seeking to block proposals to remove prices from the covers of books.

At present, the publisher's Recommended Retail Price (RRP) is printed on every book sold in the United Kingdom. But under new proposals backed by leading book chains, it will be left to retailers, instead of publishers, to choose the prices of books.

Authors fear that commercial logic will lead to heavy discounts for best selling books while slower moving titles will be removed from the shelves.

This may result in the domination of celebrity best sellers at the expense of lesser-known and still-to-be published writers who will find it even harder to get noticed.

In article to be published later this week in Bookseller, historian Antony Beevor, one of the 37 signatories to the petition, says, "British authors are facing a new threat that has potentially devastating consequences for literature."

Beevor, who is also chairman of the Society of Authors, explains it would be dangerous to remove printed cover prices because "we strongly suspect the proposal is being driven by a desire to impose super market disciplines on the entire book industry.

"Some book selling chains are interested only in mass-market predictability. This will mean even more derivative non-books, often commissioned from celebrities. Yet they are the sort of titles that all too frequently prove expensive failures.

"This is not just a question of dumbing down. The removal of diversity and unpredictability from the book trade too will prove commercially self-destructive."