Wule Bwitannia

Which brings me to my final point - the academic book in Australia. We publish little here, and most of the titles within this definition are imported from overseas. A lot of which enjoys protection as a restricted import, and has been very profitable for both the UK publisher and the Australian distributor. Bear in mind that the books have to be shipped a bloody long way from their usual points of publication - the UK, Europe or the US, and then warehoused and marketed. All of which has to be paid for, adding in another layer of cost. But I find it very, very interesting that distributors such as Footprint, Unireps or Inbooks who import and distribute books of similar topic and quality as their multinational colleagues, retail their titles at lower prices.

Until the rise and rise of Amazon, it was difficult to buy as an individual consumer from overseas sources. This I would argue allowed for one of the key but often forgotten aspects of price setting in a free market economy to operate - that you do not set your price merely according to your costs, but you set your price to that which the market will bear. Long shipping times, high individual postage costs, unfavourable exchange rates, and the high costs of using overseas retailers had until the last ten years insulated both Australian booksellers and more importantly Australian distributors from the rigours of competition. This is simply no longer the case. The price comparison for anyone with the most basic of Internet access is Amazon. And the disparity is no longer sustainable or defendable. A title due for release in the UK in August of this year, edited by two Australian academics, is to be sold on Amazon for US$32.97. It will finally be released in Australia in October, retailing for AU$80.

What this example - like so many others - demonstrates is the, at best, short-sighted self-interest on the part of the distributor to demand sole right to import the book for resale, and greed on the part of the original publisher determined to the honour the spirit of the Traditional Market Agreement of 1947, insisting upon a legal right to exploit a market. The end result will be an ever-increasing flood of purchases from Amazon, and the disappearance of academic titles from bookshop shelves in Australia.

My major concern is the loss of access to knowledge, to the somewhat ironic fettering of information in this the supposed age of endless information. The prospect of my ability to find new titles in areas of academic interest coming to rest upon Amazon’s function of “Recommended Based on Your Browsing History” is not a happy one; the possibility that it will become the de facto cultural filter for the written word would be a fitting coda to the intent of 1947.