Wule Bwitannia

As the Australian market grew, publishers began to set up Australian operations the principal purpose of which was to distribute books published and printed in Britain. Their sole right to sell into the Australian market provided extraordinary protection and made the development of Australian publishing divisions a less than risky venture. Our rise as a nation of consumers would include the ’umble book, til we would become the world’s leading buyers by per capita. A dainty dish to set before the London-based owners.

The consequences of this are still determining the nature and development of the Australian book industry. Below is a section from a Current Issues Brief of 1996-1997 for the Federal Government entitled Copyright and Monopoly Profits: Books, Records and Software by David Richardson:

The PSA’s 1989 report into book prices found, among other things, that the importation provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 prevented competition in Australia between alternative UK and US editions of the same book. Publishers were able to close the market through Australian subsidiaries or exclusive agents to import or produce and distribute in Australia.

This market structure allowed Australian prices to be kept above international levels. For example, Canada, which had access to both UK and US editions had prices below the UK. In Australia, with access only to the UK publishers, prices were 31 per cent more than Canadian prices. For specialist and technical books the price in Australia could be up to four times higher than in the UK.

The PSA felt the price of books would fall by about that much if the market were opened up for competition. Booksellers had complained of waiting up to two years before a book published overseas became available in Australia. There were additional problems when no British publisher took up the opportunity to publish American books. For example, the Vietnam war was not of major interest to British readers and so important American books never made it to Australia.

This apparently remains a problem despite recent changes. The PSA reported that competition would increase the number and range of titles available as suppliers would be forced to be more responsive to consumer needs. With direct importing the PSA also believed that availability after overseas publication would be immediate. Generally the Australian consumers were seen to be paying too much and waiting too long for overseas releases.

I would argue that the changes introduced in 1991 have made little difference, except for availability of major trade titles as simultaneous releases in the Australian market, often in paperback when released only in hardback in the US or UK. They represent significant proportions of publisher and bookseller profitability, but are a tiny part of the huge number of books published in English globally each year. The problems identified in the above quote are still ever-present.

Australian divisions of international publishers are both distributors and publishers, and claim with great vigour that their Australian publishing can only be maintained if overseas editions of Australian titles are protected and their rights to the Australian market are singular. The problem is that this extends to books not actually published here. A distributor buys the rights to the Australian market, and has the sole legal privilege to import and distribute the said book to the retail trade. A bookseller who imports such a book from the US or anywhere else is breaking the law and can be prosecuted, though the legal truth of this has yet to be tested in law.

You as a consumer can, however, source that book from wherever you like, and it is estimated that quite a few of you are doing so - to the tune of $100 million pouring into the coffers of Amazon from Australian customers in the last year. You pay no GST, you purchase it often at a highly discounted price from Amazon, with the added benefit of a weak US dollar in the current economic climate. You can probably buy that book from the US cheaper than your local independent bookseller can buy their required edition from the Australian-based distributor.

In order to sidestep the charge of price fixing, we have a recommended retail price set by publishers or distributors. Booksellers, apparently, can sell the book for any price they chose. Given discount structures offered to independent booksellers, this will return as profit to the owner, something in the vicinity of 1 per cent over a year’s turnover. One per cent. And given that that was based on analysis done in the 1980s and therefore pre-GST, I wouldn’t vouch for that any longer being the case.

I’d also ask you to remember that the average knowledgeable soul in your local independent or chain bookshop is being paid shop-assistant wages - which in NSW is a princely $15 an hour, or $15.46 if you are also in charge of a horse. Whoever is making money out of books in Australia, it isn’t your local bookshop, and it doesn’t seem to be the authors either.

This raises the spectre of another argument against unrestricted importing. It is claimed that the Australian market would be flooded with cheap imports, drowning the Australian published book. This firstly assumes that all books are interchangeable commodities - one book is replaced by any other. Presumably book buyers are completely indiscriminate, and entirely driven by price when making a selection in their local bookshop. Secondly, Australian authors will be dudded. I gather that this is based on the notion that as an author, your royalty payments from your Australian publisher will be reduced if your American edition were to be sold here. If you are lucky enough to be co-published in the US, I find it hard to imagine that you are not receiving royalties from that edition. And often at a higher percentage rate than you will receive on your equivalent Australian edition. What should be stated is that without some protection for Australian published books, publishers would be less inclined to publish. But is it hardly logical to argue the author as an individual would be worse off.

Returning to the notion of the book as an interchangeable commodity for one moment, let us imagine this is the case. The necessary advantage to then succeed in finding a buyer would then lie in the accompanying marketing. The impact of major marketing campaigns can be seen with the likes of Bryce Courtenay - with media blitz the likes of which we’d rarely seen before, forward sales of 200,000 copies into bookshops around the country were reported. The effort required to achieve that is simply not going to occur for every one of the 250,000 or so titles published in English around the globe each year. Someone can take it upon themselves to “flood” our market (which ignores the fact of British publishers doing exactly that for decades), but unless it is in some way supported by marketing, they’ll end up pulped and being fed to your dog in a bowl of meaty bites. The book as a disposable commodity may function in the chain stores such as K-mart but it is a ridiculous piece of hubris when applied to a customer in a bookshop.

It also overlooks the rather bleeding obvious fact that Australians rather like reading books about themselves. A cricket captain’s diary of a tour to somewhere else can sell in excess of 50,000 copies. Apart from those 50,000 cricket nuts spread across our wide brown land, I think we can rest assured that first, there won’t be another edition to “flood” our market, and second, those 50,000 cricket tragics will want to buy Captain Heroic’s next tome, and probably the biography, the four joke collections and barbecue book as well.

And this leads us to another sticky point. There is money to be made in Australian publishing, a lot of money, regardless of market protections, if you are publishing what the punters want, and want a lot of. What does not usually sell in any quantity is Lit-er-a-ture or academic titles. “Aha” cries the multinational publisher/distributor - if we’re not protected as distributors, we cannot subsidise the publishing of all that low volume stuff. At which stage, I shall merely point at Text, Scribe, Giramondo and Black Inc and legions of smaller publishers who publish quite a lot of that small volume stuff and without the benefit of being distributors. I think we can also safely argue that the people who buy Lit-er-a-ture currently are also likely to continue to do so, and won’t be seduced by the lure of cheap imports of American cast-offs of unknown authors to the Australian market.