Christmas Cards

I'm sorry, but here's one of my pet peeves coming up!

It's Christmas time, and we're already starting to see an awful phenomenon that seems to have infected the Australian publishing industry in recent years. Perhaps it's infected all industries, I don't know.

It's the announcement in the trade Newsletter that so-and-so publisher will not be sending Xmas cards this year but will instead donate the money to charity. Perhaps they'll follow up later with a Xmas email.

I can't help myself. Every time I read one of these miserable announcements I have to head for the bar fridge to quieten down.

Can't these people do both? By all means contribute to charity, which you should be doing on a regular basis anyway as a matter of company policy. But to do it INSTEAD of sending Xmas cards, a long tradition of acknowledging community and friendship, and expressing thanks to customers, authors and colleagues in a very personal way? Is business so bad that it's a question of cost, for God's sake?

It's Calvinism. As an Irish Catholic, I'm offended!

But if you're going to send Xmas cards then make it genuine. There's nothing more insulting than getting a pre-printed corporate card with absolutely no trace of a human hand anywhere on it. Or one that simply simply says 'Fred'! How lazy is that! Instead of that meaningless excercise it probably does make sense to stop doing it and send the money to charity!

I've always thought we should take time out to make some personal contact with each other at this time. Christmas cards are an ideal opportunity. They don't have to be sacrificed for some 'higher good'.

Booker winner The White Tiger

This year's Man Booker winner The White Tiger by young first-time novelist Aravind Adiga is a wonderful, enlivening read. It's a fierce denunciation of India in all its social, cultural, religious, political and economic dimensions. Apparantly the Indian authorities were not happy with it winning the prize, and no wonder.

No part of this sprawling society is spared. It is not primarily about the new, emerging and materialistic middle classes. It's a far more wholesale condemnation than that.

Adiga paints an India riddled with curruption, where murder and abject cruelty are commonplace and part and parcel of class, caste and power relations. Even India's famed democracy 'is a fucking joke'.

Adiga's art is the slow build. The central protaganist, the narrator, transitions from awakening, through mild resistance to outright fury, propelling the novel to its explosive ending.

Buy it and read it.

Google Settlement (again)

Radio National's Book Show this morning featured a discussion on the Google settlement with ABP Publisher Tim Coronel and media lawyer Nic Pullen.

The problem with the dicusssion was that both guests seem to think that the giant, thieving, rip-off merchant Google had somehow muscled in and secured a satanic victory against the poor little publishers and authors!!

THE OPPOSITE IS THE CASE!

Google caved. Capitulated. Paid out US$125m plus in order to get the license to continue scanning (and pay for it!), and will hand over 63% of ALL revenue from any commercial exploitation of the content including advertising revenue on display pages which publishers in their wildest dreams would never have thought possible!!

Fuck! Must we always perceive ourselves as victims?

Google Settlement

The settlement of the legal dispute between Google and US publishers and authors is quite remarkable.

It's hard not to read it as a virtual total capitulation by Google. They have agreed to cough up US$125 million to establish an organisation called the Book Rights Registry which will manage the creation and exploitation of all the digital rights involved in Google's scanning of library holdings. Google will retain 37% of all revenues collected through the commercial exploitation of the book content, including from advertising on Google's display pages. Part of the money will also be paid in compensation for scanning that has already taken place prior to this license (permission) being in place.

Google's claim had always been that it didn't need permission under the Fair Use provisions of the US Copyright Act. The impending litigation was to settle that.

Either Google realised its case was weak, or it has played it smart and bought a seat at the table for what is shaping up as one of the biggest games around.

The Book Rights Registry reminds me of our own Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Both are non-profit collecting and distributing entities and the boards have equal weightings of author and publisher members. CAL's distributions to content owners last financial year were well over A$100 million. The US model could be distributing very large sums indeed once it gets up and running.

Remix - new title on copyright from Lawrence Lessig

For anybody who is interested in the 'copyright wars' - corporations wielding huge legal sticks against innocent consumers downloading stuff for personal use - Lawrence Lessig is essential reading.

This US law professor at Stanford has just released Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. A pretty ordinary title but a fascinating read. Lessig is a passionate advocate for copyright reform. He argues persuasively for a legal regime which recognises current technological realities and doesn't cast as a felon every teenager who downloads music, TV shows, movies and other copyrighted content from file sharing and other sites because it's free but mainly because it's available and accessible.

Don't read this title however before you read his earlier book Free Culture. This is a wonderful, invigorating, stimulating, provocative, angry and superbly argued treatise on everything that's wrong with our current copyright regime and the way media and publishing corporations abuse their power by abusing their customers and the very essence of creativity.

Both books are pubished by Penguin in the US. Get them from Amazon. Shamefully, they're not available in Australia (read my blog piece on parallel importation to find out why!)

The lamentable state of publishing industry statistics

As part of the industry compensation package negotiated between the federal government and the Australian Democrats after the introduction of the GST in 2000 the government funded four years of statistics gathering by the Austalian Bureau of Statistics. The ABS surveyed publishers and booksellers each year from 2001 to 2004 inclusive.

Prior to that, from 1994 to 2000, the APA had funded the ABS publisher surveys themselves, but at huge expense. Collections were done every two years only.

The detailed picture of the industry that emerged over the ten year period from this endeavour was invaluable. No other serious and authoritative attempt to collect accurate data from the total industry had ever before been attempted. The APA had struggled for years to get its members to submit their annual stats but eventually gave it up as a bad joke. The ABA, as far as I am aware, had no better luck and in fact minimal resources to fund and manage the process.

The ABS charged the government for the years 2000-2004 around $200k each year for each collection. At the end of the period the industry pleaded with the govenment to authorise the ABS to continue the collections as part of its general mandate but no funding was ever forthcoming.

This is a real shame. Not only did the ABS bring a highly professional process to the task, all companies surveyed were obligated under law to provide the data, and on time.

The most valuable aspect of the data was the trends that could be clearly observed over the years. We could see what was happening to sales, margins, expenses, royalties, exports, staff numbers, etc. We could see how local title sales were faring compared to imports. We could see how all parts of the industry - trade, primary, secondary, tertiary, professional, etc, were faring. A fascinating tale was being told of the effect of the GST on sales, and the impact of the plummeting dollar (worth looking up again?).

I've just prepared an overview of the industry for a lecture I'm giving next week at the University of Queensland, and could only quote detailed stats for the 2003-2004 year. Embarassing!

Over the last five years though the APA has been collecting similar sorts of data from a select group of publishers, mainly the largest 20 or so, but these are available (at considerable expense I might add!) only to the participants, which is a crying shame. Retired publisher Bill Mackarell was charged with collecting them, and he did a superb job. Bill's given the game away and someone else (I forget who) has been given the job. However here we are in late 2008 and we still haven't got the 2007 stats! Not good.

These APA stats from 2003 to 2006 show real and interesting trends too. Fundamently that the publishing side of the industry has been doing very well. Sales have grown every year as has profitability. In fact publisher profitabilty is now the highest it's probably ever been. In no small part this can be put down to the recovery and resurgence of the dollar, and.....publishers not lowering their pricing in response. (Not a good place to be, I would have thought, when the Productivity Commission starts examining industry pricing practices as part of their impending enquiry into parallel importation).

The last ABS survey into bookselling, in 2004, found the opposite was happening to bookseller profitability. From 3.6% in 2001-02 to 1.9% in 2002-03 to 1.3% in 2003-04. What is the situation now? Who knows?

So, where does the industry go from here? We can't just do nothing! The Howard government refused to fund any more ABS collections, so let's not hold out any hope Rudd will do any different, especially with the huge strains on the budget likely over the next few years. I think the only realistic way forward is for a joint industry approach to CAL.

CAL is obligated under its charter to put aside 1% of its collections from the educational statutory license for what is loosely defined as 'cultural purposes'. I was ten years on the CAL board and I know that that amount of money is a challenge to spend responsibly. Outlaying $200-300k each year to fund the ABS to collect indispensable industry statistics would seem to me a valuable and justifiable way to spend part of this fund. It would be a significant contribution to the development of the cultural industry of Australian publishing/bookselling, a worthy use of these monies.

The APA and the ABA should get together and prepare a submission to the CAL board. I would expect it to be received sympathetically. What have we got to lose?

The Bill Henson Saga

Have just finished reading David Marr's new book on the Bill Henson controversy. It's a calm, measured, lucid telling of an appalling story of hysteria, philistinism and downright ignorance.

And a fine piece of publishing yet again from Michael Heyward of Text.

I was amazed at Marr's self-control. Personally, throughout the whole saga, I was as angry as hell. I tend to favor more shakespearean renderings - constant references to 'stinking mobs', etc!

Marr criticises Rudd who rushed to judgement calling the pictures 'disgusting' and 'revolting' when shown them briefly on the Today show. He should have condemned him in no uncertain terms for his abysmal lack of leadership, and the effect his immature views had on constraining all comment from government and government-funded bodies thereafter, including Arts Minister Peter Garrett and the National Gallery and Library heads.

The book is a damn good read though. Marr's nothing if not dependable.