I've been asked this question, so let me go through it in a bit of detail.
Basically, it contravenes Berne.
The Berne Convention has a clear principle known as the National Treatment principle. The point of this principle is to ensure governments do not privilege their own nationally published titles against titles published by signatory countries overseas. Berne is a global copyright treaty which most governments who respect copyright around the world are party to, including Australia.
The current 30 day provision does not breach Berne, as it is possible to fly in titles published overseas and publish them 'simultaneously' in Australia within that time frame. Our Copyright Act, like those of Berne signatories, defines simultaneous publication as 'within 30 days', reflecting the commonly used and understood concept of the 'month of publication'.
No Australian government, or in fact the government of any signatory country, could adopt a seven day time frame, as this would effectively work against granting copyright protection to imported titles. It would favor titles printed within the country - originals and local editions of overseas titles - over titles first published overseas.
A seven day replenishment time frame just compounds the problem. Of course those titles published and printed by an Australian publisher, and sitting in the warehouse, are going to be able to meet the seven day benchmark (just!), but there is no way inventory can be brought in from overseas in that time frame if the title is out of stock on receipt of an order.
When the 30 day time frame was adopted by the Australian government almost twenty years ago, it was clearly explained to the APA and the ABA at the time, by the Attorney General's department (I was there), that the industry's preference to protect only 'the Australian edition' breached our treaty obligations and could therefore never be incorporated into Australian law.
The 90 days provision could, of course, be shortened to 30 days, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Rudd government adopt this. (It has that sort of engineered protection-plus-stretch modern industry policy flavor Rudd and his industry minister Kim Carr are attracted to).
It's just disappointing to see the ABA still banging on about protecting just an 'Australian edition'. They're not articulating it this way of course, but their 7/7 recommendation is a back door way of re-introducing it.
Move on please.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The ABA Stabs Itself in the Front. Amazing!
The Australian Booksellers Association has decided to reverse its long-standing policy of supporting the abolition of the 30/90 day rule, which restricts booksellers' ability to parallel import, and has instead opted for an illogical, impractical and risible 'compromise'.
On the one hand it has agreed with the publishers' line that abolition of the restrictions would strangle the local publishing industry.
This is so disappointing. The ABA has always been a voice of sanity in this long running debate, and now it has caved. It's a massive failure of thought and an abject failure of leadership.
Let's imagine for a moment that the publishers' horror scenario does actually unfold, that any distribution agreement or purchased territorial rights become thoroughly subverted: the only way this can happen, the mechanics of it, are for Australia's booksellers, en masse, to source everything from overseas including foreign editions, bypassing the local rights holding publisher at every turn. That is, they would commit commercial suicide by aggressively acting against their own best interests. This is what publishers are implying booksellers would do, that they are economic Visigoths.
Now the ABA comes along and AGREES with them! It says, yes, you're right, our members are so stupid that they would at every opportunity act against their commercial interests and, as a by-product, destroy local literary culture! No matter how reasonable the price of the local edition, no matter how fair the trading terms from the local publisher, no matter how good the distribution and customer care, no matter how beneficial to sales the publisher's marketing and publicity efforts, no matter the excellent personal service from the sales reps, no matter the impossibility of getting anywhere near the same deal from overseas wholesalers like Baker and Taylor.... we're gonna buy around, just because we can!
I'd call that stabbing yourself in the front!
But THEN, on the other hand, the ABA says that the provisions aren't working - they are restricting competition and need reforming! They should be tightened to a 7/7 rule, with a new regulatory regime to stop publishers over-pricing and under-servicing!
Ohmigod.. this is just sooo awful!
Guys, the whole point of the proposed abolition of the provisions is to allow competitive forces to deliver just what you say you want! You can't have it both ways! You either want it or you don't.
Obviously the ABA has been sucker-punched by the mass hysteria of the publishing and author communities...the emotional and unintelligent blah that has reached fever pitch and will brook no rational opposition.
What on earth the Productivity Commission makes of this is anyone's guess. Though I remain confident they won't be fooled.
On the one hand it has agreed with the publishers' line that abolition of the restrictions would strangle the local publishing industry.
This is so disappointing. The ABA has always been a voice of sanity in this long running debate, and now it has caved. It's a massive failure of thought and an abject failure of leadership.
Let's imagine for a moment that the publishers' horror scenario does actually unfold, that any distribution agreement or purchased territorial rights become thoroughly subverted: the only way this can happen, the mechanics of it, are for Australia's booksellers, en masse, to source everything from overseas including foreign editions, bypassing the local rights holding publisher at every turn. That is, they would commit commercial suicide by aggressively acting against their own best interests. This is what publishers are implying booksellers would do, that they are economic Visigoths.
Now the ABA comes along and AGREES with them! It says, yes, you're right, our members are so stupid that they would at every opportunity act against their commercial interests and, as a by-product, destroy local literary culture! No matter how reasonable the price of the local edition, no matter how fair the trading terms from the local publisher, no matter how good the distribution and customer care, no matter how beneficial to sales the publisher's marketing and publicity efforts, no matter the excellent personal service from the sales reps, no matter the impossibility of getting anywhere near the same deal from overseas wholesalers like Baker and Taylor.... we're gonna buy around, just because we can!
I'd call that stabbing yourself in the front!
But THEN, on the other hand, the ABA says that the provisions aren't working - they are restricting competition and need reforming! They should be tightened to a 7/7 rule, with a new regulatory regime to stop publishers over-pricing and under-servicing!
Ohmigod.. this is just sooo awful!
Guys, the whole point of the proposed abolition of the provisions is to allow competitive forces to deliver just what you say you want! You can't have it both ways! You either want it or you don't.
Obviously the ABA has been sucker-punched by the mass hysteria of the publishing and author communities...the emotional and unintelligent blah that has reached fever pitch and will brook no rational opposition.
What on earth the Productivity Commission makes of this is anyone's guess. Though I remain confident they won't be fooled.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country
Just after Xmas the US National Book Award judges voted the great American novelist Peter Matthiessen's magnum opus Shadow Country the 2008 winner of its prestigious award.
Writers like Don DeLillo and Richard Ford have raved about this book. Annie Dillard called it 'a masterpiece of world literature..I would give it every prize and award on earth'. The New York Times called it 'as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature'.
When the award was announced I saw a marvellous interview with Matthiessen on Jim Lehrer's Newshour and immediately ordered the book from Amazon. I assumed, as you would, that no Australian bookseller would yet have it and would be waiting for the British edition to eventually find its way to these shores in any case.
I was wrong. Today in the Avenue bookstore in Albert Park there in all its freshly minted glory was a copy of the lavishly printed, hardback, Random House, American edition! At 900 pages this is a big book, carrying a US price of $40.00. Avenue had imported it directly and priced it A$65.00, which is today's exchange rate plus GST, an extremely fair and reasonable price. Well done Chris.
I looked up TitlePage, the industry price and availability service, to see what the local supplier - possibly Random but probably not - had priced it at and what their stock situation was. No information. Nothing. Zip. The database had never heard of it.
That says all you need to know about parallel importation, and why our local industry needs a competitive rod shoved up its arse!
Writers like Don DeLillo and Richard Ford have raved about this book. Annie Dillard called it 'a masterpiece of world literature..I would give it every prize and award on earth'. The New York Times called it 'as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature'.
When the award was announced I saw a marvellous interview with Matthiessen on Jim Lehrer's Newshour and immediately ordered the book from Amazon. I assumed, as you would, that no Australian bookseller would yet have it and would be waiting for the British edition to eventually find its way to these shores in any case.
I was wrong. Today in the Avenue bookstore in Albert Park there in all its freshly minted glory was a copy of the lavishly printed, hardback, Random House, American edition! At 900 pages this is a big book, carrying a US price of $40.00. Avenue had imported it directly and priced it A$65.00, which is today's exchange rate plus GST, an extremely fair and reasonable price. Well done Chris.
I looked up TitlePage, the industry price and availability service, to see what the local supplier - possibly Random but probably not - had priced it at and what their stock situation was. No information. Nothing. Zip. The database had never heard of it.
That says all you need to know about parallel importation, and why our local industry needs a competitive rod shoved up its arse!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
DRM - at last some enlightenment!
http://business.theage.com.au/business/worlds-big-four-music-companies-run-up-white-flag-to-digital-pirates-20090107-7c12.html
It's taken a while, but the music industry seems at last to be developing a measure of common sense. They are dropping all their restrictive and totally counterproductive DRM controls from recorded music.
They have acknowledged that consumer behavior which everyone, including them, regarded as innocent in the analogue world - such as taping, compiling, lending, etc - is innocent in the digital world as well.
They have recognised that the best and only protection for their investments is to create business models that treat consumers fairly and with respect, and don't bully, cajole, threaten and scare them.
We've been a long time in the throes of the digital transition, as content producers of all types have invariably acted timidly, frozen in the headlights. Technology has shifted the power balance in favor of the consumer, and the full implications of this are still rumbling through the old established empires.
Movie and TV producers still don't get it. Their territorially based international release schedules, for example, are dynasaurian, and are now of course hugely ignored by savvy gen y'ers as they should be.
Book publishers are still struggling with the transition, and still investing far too much money and hope in DRM protections. Those scary consumers just can't be trusted!
In a few years, hopefully, we'll be over these transition pains and living confidently in a content world where consumer choice and satisfaction are once again central and paramount.
For that's the only business paradigm that makes sense in the digital economy - being thoroughly customer-centric, not producer-centric or format-centric. It's a radical change if adopted seriously, and one most established organisations are finding it virtually impossible to accomplish. It requires creative destruction, a path rarely chosen voluntarily.
The headlights are those of a ten ton truck.
It's taken a while, but the music industry seems at last to be developing a measure of common sense. They are dropping all their restrictive and totally counterproductive DRM controls from recorded music.
They have acknowledged that consumer behavior which everyone, including them, regarded as innocent in the analogue world - such as taping, compiling, lending, etc - is innocent in the digital world as well.
They have recognised that the best and only protection for their investments is to create business models that treat consumers fairly and with respect, and don't bully, cajole, threaten and scare them.
We've been a long time in the throes of the digital transition, as content producers of all types have invariably acted timidly, frozen in the headlights. Technology has shifted the power balance in favor of the consumer, and the full implications of this are still rumbling through the old established empires.
Movie and TV producers still don't get it. Their territorially based international release schedules, for example, are dynasaurian, and are now of course hugely ignored by savvy gen y'ers as they should be.
Book publishers are still struggling with the transition, and still investing far too much money and hope in DRM protections. Those scary consumers just can't be trusted!
In a few years, hopefully, we'll be over these transition pains and living confidently in a content world where consumer choice and satisfaction are once again central and paramount.
For that's the only business paradigm that makes sense in the digital economy - being thoroughly customer-centric, not producer-centric or format-centric. It's a radical change if adopted seriously, and one most established organisations are finding it virtually impossible to accomplish. It requires creative destruction, a path rarely chosen voluntarily.
The headlights are those of a ten ton truck.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
The Millenium Trilogy
Last January (2008) the first of three volumes in the Millennium Trilogy was published in an English translation of the original Swedish novel by the late journalist/author Stieg Larsson. It was called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
I happened upon it in a bookshop in Adelaide, starting reading it and got totally absorbed in the world and the characters it created.
The second volume has just been published. It's called The Girl Who Played with Fire, and it's equally absorbing. Like the first one it's long (569 pages) but you really don't want it to end by the time you've finished it.
Like all popular fiction, of course, the main characters are pretty much larger than life. The goodies are heroic, kind, highly intelligent and competent, and the baddies cruel, violent, ugly, fat and, predictably, respected in establishment circles.
Larson also has a major problem with sex. It's gratuitous and it grates. The goodies are always jumping into bed with one another because they are good at it and enjoy it, and the baddies are always raping innocents, if not children.
Nevertheless, we can forgive Larsson for that, because he's given us such excellent and complex plots, all set in the cities and towns of Sweden, a magnificent country most of us know so little about.
You can't get much better holiday reading than these two novels. I can't wait for the third one this time next year.
I happened upon it in a bookshop in Adelaide, starting reading it and got totally absorbed in the world and the characters it created.
The second volume has just been published. It's called The Girl Who Played with Fire, and it's equally absorbing. Like the first one it's long (569 pages) but you really don't want it to end by the time you've finished it.
Like all popular fiction, of course, the main characters are pretty much larger than life. The goodies are heroic, kind, highly intelligent and competent, and the baddies cruel, violent, ugly, fat and, predictably, respected in establishment circles.
Larson also has a major problem with sex. It's gratuitous and it grates. The goodies are always jumping into bed with one another because they are good at it and enjoy it, and the baddies are always raping innocents, if not children.
Nevertheless, we can forgive Larsson for that, because he's given us such excellent and complex plots, all set in the cities and towns of Sweden, a magnificent country most of us know so little about.
You can't get much better holiday reading than these two novels. I can't wait for the third one this time next year.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Favorite book of 2008
It was a close tussle between Adiga's The White Tiger and Helen Garner's The Spare Room, but I have to give it to Garner.
In a mesmerising, seemingly quotidian but bile inducing personal narrative Garner creates perhaps the most appalling female figure in Australian literature - the grasping, insinuating, oxygen-sucking Nicola.
God, she's awful!
Buy it and read it over Xmas, and pray to god someone remotely like Nicola never comes into your life.
In non-fiction the prize definitely goes to A.A Gill's Table Talk. Gill is the restaurant critic and food writer for Britain's The Sunday Times and Tatler. The writing is fierce and wild, and blisteringly enlivening. It's just marvellous.
Browse through it in a good independent bookshop (the others won't have it) and read the piece on Starbucks. You'll then understand why that chain is going under. Then read the chapter on America and browsers around you will look at your body shaking and wonder.
I guarantee you'll buy the book and devour it!
In a mesmerising, seemingly quotidian but bile inducing personal narrative Garner creates perhaps the most appalling female figure in Australian literature - the grasping, insinuating, oxygen-sucking Nicola.
God, she's awful!
Buy it and read it over Xmas, and pray to god someone remotely like Nicola never comes into your life.
In non-fiction the prize definitely goes to A.A Gill's Table Talk. Gill is the restaurant critic and food writer for Britain's The Sunday Times and Tatler. The writing is fierce and wild, and blisteringly enlivening. It's just marvellous.
Browse through it in a good independent bookshop (the others won't have it) and read the piece on Starbucks. You'll then understand why that chain is going under. Then read the chapter on America and browsers around you will look at your body shaking and wonder.
I guarantee you'll buy the book and devour it!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Richard Flanagan's new novel: Wanting
Wanting is an exceptionally good novel. It's gripping, and stays with you long after you put it down.
Its mid-19th century setting enables Flanagan to explore its themes without the constraints of modern sensibility or political correctness, using the language and concepts of the day ('savages', 'extermination', 'civilised' etc) and with a great deal of sympathy for brutal, order-imposing colonisers as well as the native aborigines who suffered them and who..er..all died.
This is history, but from the inside. So it's the power of imaginative fiction that brings early Tasmania alive and sucks you in.
A parallel narrative concerns Charles Dickens, but its linkage with the Tasmanian story is tenuous at best. But by itself it's fascinating too.
Buy it and read it.
Its mid-19th century setting enables Flanagan to explore its themes without the constraints of modern sensibility or political correctness, using the language and concepts of the day ('savages', 'extermination', 'civilised' etc) and with a great deal of sympathy for brutal, order-imposing colonisers as well as the native aborigines who suffered them and who..er..all died.
This is history, but from the inside. So it's the power of imaginative fiction that brings early Tasmania alive and sucks you in.
A parallel narrative concerns Charles Dickens, but its linkage with the Tasmanian story is tenuous at best. But by itself it's fascinating too.
Buy it and read it.
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