The Days of the Statutory License Are Numbered

Despite the key recommendation of the Australian Law Review Commission in its Discussion Paper, the Statutory License won't be repealed by a future parliament, but it may well fade away. User bodies will in all probability not sign up for further terms or exercise their right to terminate.

As the Copyright Agency correctly points out in its recent submission responding to the ALRC's paper, users, unlike owners, have always been able to opt out of the license and either seek permission for copies they make (beyond fair dealing exceptions) or sign voluntary licenses with individual publishers or even Copyright Agency itself.

For this reason, and also because politicians always melt in the face of concerted opposition from authors and publishers preaching culture and enlightenment, the statutory license will never be legislatively repealed.

But voluntary licenses are the future and the statutory license is coming to an end.

Publishers are antagonistic to the ALRC's recommendation to repeal it and this is understandable, but they invest it with too much significance.

The industry needs to take up the challenge of negotiating voluntary licenses with schools and universities, combining print and digital. This is clearly what the customers want. The statutory license is yesterday's business model based on yesterday's photocopying technology. 

In one real sense the demise of this license should be embraced by publishers, not resisted, because while ever it exists primary relationships with customers via contracts will never have the opportunity to take root and flourish. The more innovative and entrepreneurial publishers will welcome the more competitive landscape.

Despite the years of enriching revenue flows it's time for the industry to wean itself off this print-based one-size-fits-all license. It's deadening it to the possibilities of the future. Sure, revenues will very likely drop in the short to medium term. That's a transitional cost that can't be avoided.

Textbooks are a dying business and everybody knows it. Within possibly five but certainly ten years print will no longer be a major delivery platform. Tertiary texts will die first, then Secondary, then most of the various types of print in Primary. So if over 90% of license revenues currently come from photocopying that is going to radically change.

The educational publishing industry is on the cusp of an extremely disruptive digital revolution that will dwarf what's happening in the trade sector with regard to ebooks. 

The next five or so years will see most educational publishers sign tailored subscription-based licenses with tertiary institutions and premium school customers. They will have the option of using newly developed Copyright Agency voluntary licenses for the rest if that makes sense.

Under these emerging business models publishers will have the freedom to offer comprehensive content offerings - primarily digital but inclusive of print. And the schools will demand liberal free use provisions as part of the deal, particularly involving content distribution in the classroom. Remunerable 'multiple copying' will be a thing of the past and the concept itself deemed quaint. 

Such arrangements are the mainstream future. As content goes digital, primary exploitations (formerly sales of books) and subsidiary 'bits and pieces' (eg photocopying) will collapse into comprehensive content offerings via licenses. 

Despite the claims of some publishers, it is simply not the case that voluntary licensing, either directly with individual publishers or via Copyright Agency, would be too burdensome and involve schools keeping onerous records of each and every copying instance. Sampling across sectors would still happen if parties agreed, and thus the schools' experience of Copyright Agency's voluntary license would be exactly that of the stat license. Of course direct licenses with publishers would require separate administration, but both parties would be aware of the need to keep it simple.

Only a handful of the publisher or author submissions to the ALRC  intellectually grapple with the concept of a voluntary license and how it would work. (How ironic this is considering that when the stat license was first proposed in the mid 70's content owners and an embryonic CAL objected. They pushed for a voluntary licensing regime on the basis that content owners' property should not be expropriated by the state). Such licenses are the main game in the US, the UK, Canada, and many other jurisdictions.

You only have to read the very detailed submissions from the school and university sectors on their experience - highly frustrating - of the stat license in operation to appreciate where the customers are coming from. And customers should never be ignored. Copyright Agency accuses them of misunderstanding how the license works, which I find extraordinary given the nearly thirty years of experience they've had with it.

Publishers have far more to fear than the end of this license. On the horizon, if parliament enacts the ALRC's Fair Use recommendations, which they surely will, are future liberal judicial interpretations which could wipe out huge swathes of income from educational licenses. The stat licence now delivers close to $100 million per year to the industry. This will be more than halved. (Canada in comparison delivered $23 million in 2011  before the liberalisation of their copyright regime last year). No-one can argue that copyright owners haven't had it good in Australia over the last 30 years due to our unique statutory license and the huge success of a smart and aggressive collecting society, CAL.

But now the tide is now turning. Digital is upending everything. The best thing publishers can do is look to the future, not try to preserve the past. While revenues might decline profits will hold up as bookseller discounts and all the substantial costs associated with the legacy of print are eliminated. 

Such is the universal logic of digital.

The ALRC Copyright Reform Proposals.

Wednesday this week was the day a live grenade was thrown at Australia's dated Orwellian Copyright laws. 

It was hurled by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) in the form of a Discussion Paper which was a long 383 page response to the submissions it had called for last year as part of its brief to report to government on the adequacy of our copyright regime to deal with digital realities, specifically whether content users were getting a fair deal.

There were close to 300 submissions. 

What initially impressed me about the Discussion Paper was its respect for all points of view, even the crazy ones. It was sympathetic, nice, polite and politically neutral at every turn.

But under this guise comes a grenade that will have radical reverberations through all the ways consumers interact with copyrighted material in the 21st century. 

The ALRC has called for a flexible, open-ended Fair Use concept to replace all our current Fair Dealing exceptions, thus freeing them from the tightly prescriptive shackles that make them so frustrating and limiting for most users currently; and it's also, amazingly in my view, called for the repeal of the 30 year old Statutory Licenses that govern uses of content in educational institutions and governments and which cost these bodies close to $100 million a year in fees paid to copyright owners.

It's as if the ALRC has said 'Go back and start all over again! The system's not working. Come up with fair, clear, sensible proposals that consumers will respect, and that won't bog down education in silly bureaucratic tangles'.

Has it shown a bias towards content users like schools and universities, and tech giants like Google who want as much frictionless access to content as possible? Certainly. But this was predictable as owners in this country have had it too good for too long, and a good measure of re-balancing was overdue.

But the commission has obviously bent over backwards to be fair to owners as well. This is a pro-business document in a substantive way. It accords enormous respect to the need for any copyright regime to provide sufficient incentive and financial reward to owners and investors. In fact I found it increasingly frustrating the longer I read, in that it seemed to accord too much weight to what, for me, were silly opinions that should have been whacked out of the park. It was was bipartisan to a fault. 

Not once does it refer to the need to restore some measure of 'balance' between owners and users (apart from when quoting a submission). It never refers to the currently fashionable 'users rights' terminology. It never criticises court judgements that have been universally condemned, like the appalling Kookaburra/Men At Work case. It never even suggests that conservative, iffy judgements like Optus Now may well have been decided differently under a more progressive Fair Use regime. 

However this tendency to be even-handed and nice means it refuses to come down on one side or another even when it's called for to tease out the implications - many dire - of a Fair Use application. It lets far too much go to the keeper.

One critical example is its recommendation that 'education' be added to the list of 'illustrative purposes' for determining whether a particular use is fair. It studiously avoids mentioning whether this includes copying by teachers for students, such as multiple copying for classroom use, or downloading an article from a web site to a school server for classroom display. But this is the crux of the issue and something the school systems desperately want. Right now they have to pay big sums for it. In fact the schools claim that 65% of what Australian schools pay for under the statutory license is free in jurisdictions such as the US and Canada. 

It's as if the ALRC is a stealth bomber but not coming clean about it. 

There is some excellent stuff on 'non-consumptive (technical) use', 'third parties', 'text and data mining' and broadcasting, but this familiar refrain keeps being repeated over and over again:

       'The users say this. The owners say this.
        Fair Use will sort it out. 
        Some uses will be judged to be fair, others not. 
        It all depends'.

This to me is profoundly disappointing. For a body such as the ALRC, rich in legal knowledge and expertise, to constantly throw everything to future court judgements in this way sort of escapes responsibility for providing a measure of reassurance to users and owners alike. You are the one tossing the grenade so give us a feel for what you think will happen. Not a guarantee, just an educated guess. And we're not even asking for a preferred position or outcome. For lawyers that would be going just a tad too far!

This is copyright liberalisation the hard way, via litigation and the courts. Millions of dollars will likely be spent to get clarification. Two recent cases in the US and Canada to do with fair use in education have recently expanded what's deemed to be fair - one allowing US lecturers to add articles and chapters to e-reserves for access by students (remunerable in Australia), and the other allowing Canadian teachers to multiple copy for classroom use including constructing coursepacks (also remunerable in Australia) - so it is highly probable this sort of lawyer enriching trudge through the courts will be necessary in Australia. (As US copyright guru Larry Lessig quipped: 'Fair Use in America is the right to hire a lawyer'!)

Finally, on the issue of contracts and whether they should be allowed to override the fair use exceptions  in the Act. The ALRC effectively has it both ways. For some reasonably innocuous exceptions - no, they shouldn't be; but for the more contentious, more liberal ones like teacher copying - yes, they possibly should. 

So in the end it will all come down to this: the current Statutory Licenses will be replaced by voluntary licenses where universities and school systems will sign directly with publishers and broadcasters and other owners, or with collecting societies, and there will be enormous argy-bargy and vexation over what should be paid for and what shouldn't, and the amounts paid; and there will be some rather large test cases between uses and owners to sort out what precisely is fair and what isn't.

In my humble view, in order to avoid enriching any further the legal community, and to save decades of time, both parties should devise agreed protocols as to what should be remunerable and what should not, and the range of uses allowed and for what purposes. Such protocols would settle all sorts of things and allow business to proceed. Individual owners, competing in the marketplace, can come to their own agreements on prices and any further allowances, but they can't offer less than the minimums spelt out in the protocols. We're used to Awards and minimum wages and conditions in this country.

To get these sorts of industry protocols takes a good measure of generosity on all sides. Let's hope it's there.  

In conclusion, the ALRC is to be congratulated. After all, the grenade was long overdue.

An Exquisitely Dumb Move from Cengage

After Wiley lost its recent case in the US Supreme Court on the issue of 'first sale' and re-importation (I blogged about it below) it was always possible, however remotely, that a major US higher education publisher would panic and indulge in some sort of extraordinarily silly and defensive behaviour.

Cengage has done it. It has just announced a new 'global pricing' initiative:

Cengage announces global price structure for US-based higher ed print titles

Cengage Learning will adopt a new global pricing structure for US-originated higher education print titles in July, with around a third of the US-originated titles distributed by Cengage Australia to be affected.

Paul Petrulis, vice president of Higher Education and Gale for Cengage Learning Australia, told Books+Publishing that ‘with the new pricing structure, prices will increase for many of the titles, however, for a smaller cohort, prices will decrease’.

Petrulis said the new structure is a response to the recent Kirtsaeng v Wiley case in the US, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of first sale, which allows for ‘legally acquired copyrighted works to be resold by their owners’, applies to works made overseas. Petrulis said that the ruling widened the definition of the first sale doctine, ‘allowing re-importation of US products originally created in the US from lower priced markets’. 

The new prices will apply to US-originated higher education print titles published from 2012 onwards, and will come into effect on 31 July. Petrulis said that this means the majority of Cengage Australia’s products will not be affected, including: all digital products; all locally authored, adapted and produced titles; all custom print and digital products; all Gale reference digital products; all Nelson Secondary and Primary schools products; and all English Language Teaching and National Geographic products.

While Petrulis said that Cengage is the first US education publisher to respond to the Kirtsaeng v Wiley case in this way, he said it is ‘an industry-wide issue and it is highly likely other publishers are also looking to how they respond’.

‘Publishers of higher education texts from the US have often substantially lowered and varied pricing of their print texts for international markets within Asia, Europe and Australia,’ said Petrulis. ‘Over the years, publishers’ ability to do this has eroded as the distributors in lower-priced markets have sourced texts at a lower price and re-imported them back into the US at a much higher price, and made a handy profit. The books that are re-imported from lower priced markets compete with local US distributors and ultimately lessen the value of the publishers’ product.’

‘In addition, the development of large-scale online retail across the globe, combined with favourable shipping rates and delivery times, has accelerated this process,’ said Petrulis, who added that the Kirtsaeng v Wiley case ‘has effectively eliminated one of the last legal protections US publishers had to combat re-importation, often referred to as “leakage” or “arbitrage”’.

However, Petrulis said that there is an upside for the Australian market in introducing a global pricing structure, with Cengage Australia ‘actively pursuing ... greater emphasis and opportunities for more local authors to adapt and create content’. He said there will also be ‘advantages for local booksellers as this change creates a global price floor’, which will allow ‘local Australian booksellers with online facilities [to] effectively compete on price with international retailers such as Amazon or the Book Depository’. ‘Digital versions of US print products, which will be generally priced lower, are also likely to get an additional uptake as students take advantage of the digital format,’ said Petrulis.

(Courtesy http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/DetailPage.aspx?type=item&id=27325)



The point about this is that it's not really a global pricing policy at all. It's a US first policy where the rest of the world is told to go suck.

Differentiated, territorial pricing around the globe is age old in book publishing, and makes all sorts of strategic and financial sense. This is particularly so in higher education. Less developed countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa have for decades enjoyed lower prices on US-originated textbooks to reflect market conditions, namely the students' ability to pay. Publishers, universally, have produced lower cost paperback editions or priced their hardback US editions at far lower prices than those charged US students. (Australia and the UK have benefited from this policy over the years too, though with far less justification).

A decade or so ago, because the internet made international price comparisons easy, US students became increasingly aware of these price differentials and leakage back to the US began. Mr Kirtsaeng saw a commercial opportunity, prompting Wiley's litigation.

An important point here is that the Supreme Court's decision against Wiley was hardly surprising. Nothing really new happened. The understood status quo was confirmed. No 'expansion' of the first sale doctrine took place. The copies were 'lawfully made' in an overseas country, that is, they weren't pirate copies.

Cengage's panicky, over the top reaction is entirely unjustified. Asian and African markets will see huge price rises (at least double or triple), all done to protect the revenues and profits of the huge US market. Sales outside the US will collapse and piracy will get a huge boost. Cengage's name will be mud. They should also expect governmental pressure of some sort. In the end there's no way they can win. They would have been better advised to join with their industry colleagues and lobby Congress to toughen the law on re-importation.

If global pricing were to make any strategic sense at all it would be accompanied by significant price reductions in the US - in the order of 25 to 30%. But this is a far too bitter pill to swallow, so don't hold your breath.

No other major US higher ed company will follow this move. They are well on the way to the digital future where tailored, contractual pricing is the norm across the globe. 'Global pricing' of printed textbooks is the last gasp of the dying analogue age. And, ironically, perhaps the last gasp of a soon to be bankrupt Cengage.

Bollocks, basically: The Sieghart Report on UK libraries and ebook lending

Last year the UK Culture minister commissioned a panel of library and publishing industry representatives to investigate e-lending by public libraries in England and to make some recommendations.

The panel was chaired by philanthropist, entrepreneur and publisher William Sieghart, and their rather slim and insubstantial report was published this week.

The key recommendations were:

·       A number of pilots in 2013 using established literary events should be set up to test business models and user behaviours, and provide a transparent evidence base: all major publishers and aggregators should participate in these pilots.

·       Public libraries should offer both on-site and remote E-Lending service to their users, free at point of use.

·       The interests of publishers and booksellers must be protected by building in frictions that set 21st-century versions of the limits to supply which are inherent in the physical loans market (and where possible, opportunities for purchase should be encouraged).  These frictions include the lending of each digital copy to one reader at a time, that digital books could be securely removed after lending and that digital books would deteriorate after a number of loans.  The exact nature of these frictions should evolve over time to accommodate changes in technology and the market.

Frankly, this is staggeringly lame. Its main thrust is to ensure the publishing industry remains unshaken and unstirred by the emerging e-lending practices of libraries. It is profoundly protectionist and conservative. .

I can't imagine this report will garner any respect in the wider library community. It's bollocks, basically.

Firstly, it doesn't intellectually grapple with the arguments at all. It blithely assumes that 'friction' is necessary or the whole publishing industry will collapse.

It recommends pilots be set up, and, incredibly, 'all major publishers and aggregators should participate..' Why? The business is happening. Librarians know what's happening. Publishers know what's happening. And if no credible data is being collected in the UK, well, no need to panic. There's plenty of quantitative stuff (Pew, mainly) being collected in the US. There's nothing so strange about the English, surely, that they need to reinvent the wheel.

As for the recommendation to emulate analogue 'frictions' in the e-lending world, this is a highly contentious issue that should not be simply accepted as a starting point. Perhaps such contrivance is not really necessary? We'll never know from reports like this one.

A far better and more productive, but no doubt vulgar, way to proceed would be to just let market forces prevail. Why not let the publishers and librarians fight it out between them, and allow industry norms to develop as they eventually will. The more courageous and progressive publishers will blaze the trail and the dead-headed rest will eventually follow.

There's no 'role for government' here. But our UK colleagues love this sort of stuff. Remember the Net Book Agreement?

Supreme Court Decision in Wiley Importation Case

The background:  a Thai national studying in the US imported from Thailand, and subsequently sold on eBay, 600 copies of a Wiley textbook that had been reproduced by Wiley Asia in a cheaper edition and priced for the local Asian market. Such International Student Editions (ISE's) are common in the Higher Ed market. 

The price he charged his customers was obviously a lot cheaper than the US edition available from US campus bookshops.

Wiley took him to court and won. They also won on appeal. Both judgements rested on section 602 of the US Copyright Act that quite explicitly prohibits unauthorised importation of lawfully made copies of works.

However the student, Mr Kirtsaeng, was not satisfied and applied to the Supreme Court for a hearing. 

His argument was that another, more fundamental, section of the Act (109) had priority and should have determined the outcome of the case. This section deals with the 'first sale doctrine', commonly known as the 'exhaustion' of rights when the work is sold. When the customer buys the book all ownership rights are transferred. The publisher relinquishes any further control over subsequent selling, lending or hiring activities (but not copying). Thus libraries, second hand bookshops, museums and other entities can legitimately trade in the property without seeking the publisher's permission. Kirtsaeng also contended such exhaustion was global, thus enabling international trading.

The Supreme Court's judgement, in its majority and dissenting opinions, is a fascinating exploration of all these conflicting issues. Of course it benefited Kirtsaeng to focus on exhaustion, and it benefited Wiley to focus on importation.

The majority decision privileged the notion of exhaustion, thus allowing free and open importation.

The minority view distinguished the two principles and opted to privilege the prohibition of importation thus sidestepping the exhaustion issue.

In the end the argument seems to have rested on differing interpretations of Congress's intentions when framing both sections.

Congress will no doubt now be lobbied by publishers and other parties to clarify its intentions into law by strengthening the importation prohibitions.

Australia has clear importation provisions - the infamous Parallel Importation Provisions (PIRs).

So as in Australia, the debate in the US should be about whether such prohibitions are worthwhile or not, i.e. whether they do more harm than good. It should never be about rights exhaustion.

It's always been my view that Australia's PIRs are harmful to the economy and consumers and should be repealed. They operate to protect over-pricing and under-servicing by uncompetitive publishers.

However it also seems pretty clear to me that the commercial imperatives in the US are fundamentally different, and justify restrictive importation provisions. Prices in the US, particularly for trade books, are low by international standards, so the importation restrictions are not working to prop up prices to uncompetitive levels. 

For educational materials the ability of publishers to price low in developing countries is an imperative that should not be undermined by unrestricted importation back to the the US. The world needs these materials to be available at differentiated prices to ensure affordability by local students. Publishers should be able to stop these low cost versions from being able to be re-imported. 

Publishing 101: Questions from a student

A student of publishing in the UK asked me for answers to the following questions. Other students of Publishing 101 courses may find them useful, so I've posted them here:

Do you think the use of digital media will have a positive effect on the publishing industry? Please give your reasons?

Yes, it certainly will, mainly because it will ensure its survival. Publishing as a business will dwindle and possibly die unless it embraces all the opportunities that the new digital age creates.

Ebooks are now a fact of everyday life in the industry, particularly for fiction. Most experts are forecasting that they’ll account for at least 50% of total fiction and narrative (non-illustrated) non-fiction revenues within the next few years. They are close to 30%, at least in the US, today.

The shift to ebooks of illustrated titles (cookery, travel, children’s, etc) is still at an early stage of development but a number of new software systems and packages are coming onto the market that are helping overcome the burdensome and expensive production process. Many publishers believe that the real digital revolution will not come to maturity until these sorts of titles are commonplace. That could take another five to ten years.

How do you think digital books and journals will affect education?

They are currently revolutionising the industry, and will continue to. Traditional textbook publishers have begun releasing fully digital versions of their content that incorporate elements that only digital can provide – for example, online assessment, online tutorial, customisation, classroom management tools and communication. School and university administrations are welcoming these innovations as they add real value to their offerings and save teacher and administration time. To compete with free online resources (MOOCs), for one thing, publishers will need to offer extensive administrative services as well as content.

The large educational publishers have begun negotiating with university administrations to allow their content to be accessed by students via the universities’ own Learning Management Systems (LMS), and for an annual license fee payable directly by each university. This is a very different business model than the current, print-based, student purchase one. But it is not one that is foreign to publishers. Scholarly (journal) publishers in particular have been doing business this way for years. So it will be simply a matter of moving it from the library’s interface to the LMS. (‘Simply’ being too simple a word! The transition will be lumpy and difficult).

This model has decided advantages for publishers however. It’s calculated on the basis of 100% of enrolled student participation, eliminates returns, cuts out the second hand market, and cuts out any involvement by booksellers in the supply chain, thus saving considerable cost. The ultimate price to the student can thus be reduced. Any fee charged the student by the university to recover the cost of their license would be much lower than the average student’s current annual printed textbook cost. (Equity issues arise here however. Some jurisdictions, Australia for example, do not allow the purchase by students of commercial learning resources to be mandated).

It is early days yet for these sorts of licenses, but most publishers can see that the license model is the future.

Journal publishers are of course well and truly ahead of all other industry sectors in their transition to the digital environment. They have virtually completed it, and are now in the throes of finessing their digital platforms, for example by developing comprehensive usage data that can allow university libraries to refine their subscriptions. They are also developing data mining functionality, allowing academics to drill down into the huge volumes of research data and discover connections, etc. This is a rapidly growing field.

Do you think it will have different effects in secondary school and primary school education?

Most school publishers, particularly secondary, are publishing digital offerings now. The larger publishers, who have more financial and technical resources, are paving the way. The nature of their offerings however is paralleling what’s being done in the tertiary textbook sector. Online assessment and tutorial are critically important dimensions.

The need to include interactivity, illustrated and full colour material (photos, line drawings, tables, charts, graphs, etc) and video material, is slowing down the roll-out of digital resources that are the core component of the package and not just an optional and limited added extra to a printed text. The production of these resources is very expensive, and skilled, technical staff need to be hired.

As in the university sector new business models based on licensing, whether school by school or regionally, need to be negotiated. This is all pretty unfamiliar territory for publishers and educational authorities, but it seems inevitable that it’s the way of the future.

 What do you think are the positives and negatives of ebooks against printed ones?

Much of my answer to this question is contained in my comments above. However as a general statement I would say that moving online brings all the advantages that the internet brings to modern life. We simply can’t imagine life without search engines, web sites, online commerce, social media, etc. Likewise students in ten years time would not possibly be able to imagine engaging with published educational content at recognised educational institutions without the rich interactivity that learning involves.

Similarly, general consumers in the trade market are very quickly embracing e-readers, whether dedicated e-ink devices or all-purpose tablets. The widespread acceptance of these devices guarantees a substantial market for ebooks in the future.

Negatives? Digital Rights Management (DRM) for a start! The restrictions placed on lending to family and friends, and borrowing from libraries; the non-interoperability of ebooks across the various e-readers, which restricts a purchaser to one particular eco-system, e.g. Amazon’s Kindle; the fact that purchasers don’t really own their ebooks as they do physical books, but ‘license’ them; the territorial rights deals that prohibit a purchaser from buying outside the designated territory, unlike for physical books.

Many publishers lament the low prices for ebooks, and the fact that the ‘Agency’ model of supply has been outlawed, at least for two years, by the US Department of Justice, thus removing pricing control from publishers. I don’t share this view. The agency model is anti-consumer and was only ever about inhibiting Amazon. Because of the DRM restrictions ebooks are not worth anywhere near the price of the original printed edition, and publishers ought to allow actual consumer behaviour, mediated by independent retailers, to establish acceptable pricing benchmarks.

Do you think the print publishing industry will eventually be gone or will it always exist alongside digital publishing?

Printed books will survive but certainly not be published for every title as a matter of course. And those that are printed, apart from bestsellers, will only be on the market for a short period of time – maybe a year or two. The ebook version will continue and be the only one available for years afterwards. Simple economics will govern this.

The aesthetically beautiful books will always be published in print editions, but fiction and narrative non-fiction titles, particularly those with niche, specialist markets, will increasingly be available only in ebook format.

One major issue governing the publishing and availability of print books will be the demise of the bricks and mortar bookseller, an entity that plays a critically important role in book marketing and merchandising. As booksellers become more rare, so do shelf space, display and the possibility for browsing and impulse buying.

How do you think the digital publishing age will affect libraries? Will libraries still exist?

Libraries will continue long into the future to play a vital social role in the community. Publishers who are at present refusing to supply ebooks to libraries, or who are supplying in very restrictive ways – higher prices, limited lending periods and volumes, limited catalogues (for example, backlist only) – are making a major mistake.

Libraries serve the information, study and entertainment needs of large segments of society that cannot afford to purchase all that they may like to, or, like students, need access to voluminous amounts of information. It does no good to deny people access to published content just because of their financial or occupational circumstances. ‘Cannibalisation’ is not a concept that makes any sense here.

As well, patrons who discover authors through their library will often purchase further works from that author through normal commercial channels. The library therefore is a prime marketing vehicle for publishers, and will become even more important the more bookseller shelf space dwindles in the future.