During a few days break at Queenscliff last January, I went into a new crime fiction bookshop. Several of my books were available. They were American hardback editons. priced at $26. This was a pretty good deal - the Australian paperbacks retail for around $30. As a book-buyer, I would have been delighted to get such a bargain. As an author, I wasn't so happy. I was being robbed.
What the bookstore was doing was illegal under the current law. It was engaged in rampant profiteering which undermined my livelihood and threatened the viability of my publisher.
This is why.
US and British editions of Australian authors can be bought dirt cheap in America and Britain and dumped onto the Australian market at a lower price than the local paperback edition. US print runs are very large (imagine the numbers involved in providing just a couple of copies to every store in the US). More books are printed than are expected to sell, so there is a a commensurately large supply of remaindered copies. These are sold for a few cents to remainder wholesalers who sell them cheap to retailers. The author earns no royalties on remainders.
The books I found in Queensliff seemed like a bargain at $27 - but they probably cost the bookshop as little as $2.
Not only do I loose out, so do readers. For a start, they get the American version from which many Australian idioms and references have been edited because they were considered too unfamiliar or incomprehensible to many American readers. More importantly, the undermining of the livelihood of Australian authors and publishers will kick the shit out of a currently flourishing Australian publishing industry. Where once we were merely a colonial outpost in both commercial and cultural terms, we are now writing and publishing books that find readers and win awards all over the world.
Under the current law, which protects the intellectual property rights of Australian writers and publishers, this is prohibited.
But the profiteers can smell a quick buck and they are doing their best to revert to the old colonial system where Australian publishers were simply the local agents for international best-sellers.
Dymocks is leading the charge, in cahoots with our wonderful national supermarket chains. In pursuit of the easy profits to be made from importing remainders, it is lwaging a PR campaign and lobbying very hard at a high political level to have the current regulations abolished. They want to be able to buy books for pennies overseas, then mark them up to just under the RRP, trouser the massive profit and claim that they are doing the book-buying public a favour by keeping book prices down. In pursuit of this aim, the have deployed a politically well-connected board member (Bob Carr, former NSW premier and all-round pompous ass) and spewed out a series of arguments that lurch from the merely ludicrous to the outright mendacious. (As NSW Premier, Carr starved schools and teachers of funds - now he argues that kiddies are growing up illiterate because Tim Winton is a greedy bastard)
Unfortunately Kevin Rudd appears to have bought this line, at least for the moment. Last year, he commissioned a Productivity Commission report with a view to changing the current legislation.
The Productivity Commission took submissions from booksellers, publishers, authors, printers and the book-buying public and released a draft report in March.
It found hardly any support for changes to the current regulations. It found that Australian retail book prices were comparable to prices in the US and Britain. (I know, I know...everybody in the country has an anecdote about how cheap books are in America.. but exchange-rate factored figures over a ten year period averaged for a wide category books are a bit more persuasive). It found that printers would be put out of work. It admitted that Australian authors would find it even harder to make a living. It admitted that it lacked quantitative evidence, or even basic statistical data, upon which to base its recommendations. It even suggested that giving grants might be a better way of keeping Australian writers and publishers afloat than allowing them to retain and sell their intellectual property.
The report is a bizarre document. Essentially, it attempts to shoe-horn a complex and sophisticated industry into a discredited theoretical framework. Free-market ideology, it declares, trumps the facts.
The draft report attracted a large number of adverse comments. The Commission is now producing its final report. That report will not be made public. The decision about its implementation will be made behind closed doors. The profiteers are pulling out all stops to ensure the decision goes their way.
Watch Richard Flanagan's take on the subject at the close of the Sydney Writers' Festival