As if we all didn't have enough to worry us, the Australian government has sooled its attack dogs on the Australian publishing industry. The Productivity Commission has been given the task of investigating whether Australian territorial copyright for books should be surrendered, so that parallel imports -- foreign-originated or foreign-sourced books -- might be freed legally to compete with local editions.
To understand any of this, a bit of history and context is needed. In 1991, the fundamental copyright protections available to Australian authors and publishers under the Copyright Act 1968 were qualified by the introduction of two new rules that were aimed at increasing, in bureaucrat-speak, 'the timeliness and availability of books in the Australian market'. They were introduced, to put it bluntly, to stopping foreign-owned publishers from sitting on their rights and not exercising them, which was a practice that had been making Australian consumers and booksellers increasingly frustrated.
The first of these rules -- the so-called '30-day rule' -- stipulated that in order for publishers to continue to be protected against parallel imports, they had to make new titles available for sale within 30 days of their first publication overseas. If a book was not published locally within this period, Australian booksellers could import it from foreign publishers and distributors themselves. A related provision, 'the 7/90-day rule', obliged publishers to supply the book trade, within 90 days of being asked to do so, of copies of foreign-sourced books to which they already had rights.
These 'use it or lose it' rules were the result of a lot of argy-bargy at the time between protectionists and free-traders. As it turned out, the political compromise that the rules represented was a masterstroke: it resulted in the flowering of the Australian publishing industry, to the great benefit of authors, book buyers, booksellers, book printers, and the culture as a whole.
Under these provisions, Australia virtually invented the trade paperback (because it was faster and cheaper to get to market than a hardback, which was the format in which the US and UK originated their titles); an improved range of books started to appear in bookshops promptly and at competitive prices; and smaller publishers, in particular, were able to expand their publishing programmes, and to support them with marketing expenditures and author tours.
Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, a publishing industry emerged that was to become the marvel of the Western world. With territorial copyright guaranteed, a rights-buying culture emerged, and then a rights-selling one. Microscopic independent publishers became small and then medium-sized ones; new publishers emerged and flourished; multinational publishers beefed-up their local programmes; independent booksellers retained their vitality and their market-share; local authors gained more publishing choices and greater visibility; major writers' festivals sprang up and strengthened around the country, often headlined or attended by foreign authors who otherwise wouldn't have been heard of; and the local media were continually offered a rich fare of talent to review and interview.
As a result, Australian book publishing has become the most successful cultural industry in the country (much more successful than the local film industry, for example) -- all without any significant subsidies from government. It has never boomed financially but, compared to the US and the UK, it has become vibrant. Whereas it was once a plaything of foreign-owned distributors, it has become a complex ecosystem, with multiple symbiotic relationships increasing all the time.
All of this is now at serious risk. There are two main ways, I think, in which the industry would be decimated if parallel imports were allowed. Without the protection of territorial copyright, rights buyers would not be able to offer for overseas titles with any confidence, and certainly would not be able to support their publication with local marketing and promotional activities. In turn, our local publishing programmes, which are effectively underwritten by our access to overseas-originated titles, would shrink: there would be a reduction in quantity and diversity, and a forced emphasis on likely bestsellers.
Rights sellers, on the other hand, would face unbearable competition from foreign editions of their own titles -- either offered at run-on marginal costs, or as remainders. In either case, their authors would get either low royalties or none at all. Local publishers would not be able to afford to pay high advances to prominent local authors, and local publishing programmes would contract significantly.
The collateral damage would also be significant. Book printers would be devastated, as their business has been built on local and UK-owned publishers printing locally to abide by the 30-day rule. Local authors and literary agents would be imperilled. And Australia would revert to its twentieth-century status of being a territorial dumping ground, our bookshops filled with books that other people wanted us to have.
All of these devastating consequences would follow from the imposition of a solution in search of a problem. Ironically, the main original problem of overseas-originated books not being available promptly no longer exists. Sometimes, we even publish US titles before they're available in the United Kingdom.
Even the alleged problem of local books being more expensive than overseas versions has been dispatched by the plunge in value of the Australian dollar against most other currencies. In any case, book pricing is more at the mercy of booksellers than you might think; in recent years, when the local dollar was high, enterprising booksellers kept their windfall profits when importing US titles. And some booksellers have given recent evidence that they favour higher -- not lower -- prices -- by selling a range of local books above their recommended retail prices.
Booksellers do have a legitimate grievance, but it's not addressed by this inquiry: the ability of consumers to buy books from overseas online suppliers without having to pay GST. This is completely indefensible, and irrational -- the government would earn additional revenue by levelling the GST playing field, and it would help local booksellers by doing so.
The federal government picked up parallel importation as a fit subject for investigation as a piece of 'unfinished business' from the previous regime. It has few dedicated proponents: one bookselling chain that's keen to import titles directly, whatever the cost to anybody else; a former faux-intellectual Labor premier who seems to be compensating for having turned masterly inactivity into an art form during his reign; and maybe a Labor prime minister who wants to prove his 'reform' credentials in an industry that his predecessor found too hard.
Of course, referring this subject to the Productivity Commission is like asking duck-hunters what they'd like to shoot. The PC is the last redoubt of economic rationalism here, in an era when the whole world is paying very high costs for having believed that unregulated markets deliver acceptable results. As a hint of their attitude, a section of the PC's 'Issues Paper', just released, wonders innocently whether 'direct subsidies or other potential assistance mechanisms [could] provide similar benefits to Australian author/publishers as the parallel import restrictions'. This smells of so-called 'transitional arrangements' -- drop-dead money that has been routinely proffered to all those manufacturing industries that have already been rationalised out of existence.
Still to come is Kevin Rudd's famous 'due process': submissions to the PC, the release of its draft report, 'roundtables' to discuss the report, supplementary submissions, and a final report. Don't hold your breath waiting for the PC to deliver a vindication of the current arrangements, though, or for the federal government to see the light.
I have been in this business, on and off, for over thirty years: I've been a book printer, an author, a freelance journalist, and book reviewer; our company won the inaugural small publisher of the year award in 2006, and we won it for the second time this year. I hope that's enough experience to make people pay attention when I say that surrendering territorial copyright and allowing the parallel importation of books is a terrible idea. It is a dagger aimed at the heart of Australian publishing.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can say with confidence that if you wanted to come up with a policy to produce a healthy trade-publishing industry, and everything that went with it, you would produce the 30-day rule that has governed the provision of Australian territorial copyright since 1991. Conversely, if you wanted to destroy the industry, you would do away with the rule.
I have no confidence that the Productivity Commission will see it this way, or that the federal government will disagree with it. This will require a political campaign of massive proportions to overcome. I, for one, am prepared to abandon a lifetime of party-political support to stop the barbarians from getting their way.
Henry Rosenbloom