Scribe Publications: Henry's Blog

A victory for common sense

2009-11-11T13:39:52Z

After a 16-month-long process, the Australian government has decided not to change the regulatory regime involving the parallel importation of books.

This is a welcome decision. It represents a triumph of common sense over ideology.

It is also a heartening and refreshing sign that the government, from the prime minister down, is able to deal with a highly complex subject in a professional, clear-sighted way while retaining core Labor values.

I also want to thank everybody who contributed to the campaign to retain territorial copyright. While it has been a painful — sometimes agonising — fight, I have been tremendously impressed by the thoughtfulness, commitment, and camaraderie of all the publishers, authors, literary agents, printers, organisations and individuals involved. The result was a remarkable degree of solidarity and a treasure-trove of information about the book industry and what drives the people in it.

I hope we never have to go through this again. But, if we do, we will have at our disposal what will come to be seen as a classic political case-study in how to beat propaganda with the truth.

Henry Rosenbloom

Books aren't widgets: the Dick/Henry finale

2009-11-03T10:44:54Z

On 2 November, Dick Smith replied to my latest email to him (see my previous posts to this blog). On 3 November — Melbourne Cup day — I replied. Then he and I had a further exchange. Here is that correspondence.

Dear Henry

Thanks for your email of Friday 30 October (7.46pm). It looks as if self-interest is strong and booming in the publishing industry. Good on you! That’s the whole basis for Capitalism. I still, however, have a feeling that the advantages are mainly going to you and similar businesses, not really to the consumer.

You state –

instead, from our understanding that a large source of our business will be removed if we are unable to have guaranteed access to our own territory when we acquire overseas-originated books or sell Australian books to overseas territories.

This actually sounds to me like the globalised marketplace. Yes, lots of people fought against it for many years, but it seems to be a fact of life – for just about everything except books and a few other selected products.

I imagine you accept the benefits offered by the global economy in everything you buy – that’s why I have always supported competition and I have never supported import restrictions to prevent competition.

I have a feeling that you don’t really know what the marketplace would be like with the restrictions removed. That would be because you have always worked in a marketplace which has been restrictive.

I am different to you – I just love competition. To me, not having competition would be like cheating at sport, and I wouldn’t be in that.

Regards Dick.

Dear Dick

Thank you for your reply of 2 November.

I think I can see why we’ll never agree: you think books are products, like widgets or shirts. They’re not.

Even a widget can only be manufactured legally because a patent was originally issued to its designer or inventor. A book is even more complicated, because it can only come into existence once an author has created it. The author is protected by copyright, but he or she can only exercise this right by licensing territorial copyright. And publishers can only justify risking their resources if the territorial copyright they acquire is recognised by the law of the land.

Your argument, ultimately, is with copyright itself. There’s no doubt there would be a totally free trade in books – a competitive marketplace of the kind you love – if there were no underlying copyright protection for them. There’d just be a small problem, though: there’d be no authors, no royalties, and no publishers.

Best wishes

Henry Rosenbloom

Dear Henry

Actually, you are wrong. I totally support strong copyright laws and protection of authors. “The author is protected by copyright, but he or she can only exercise this right by licensing territorial copyright” (my underlining).

I understand you have this belief, however it is not based in fact.

Because of globalisation we tend to have a world marketplace now. I do realise that there has been an attempt to try and keep copyright to a particular territory. However, what size should the territory be? Should it be by suburb? Obviously, that would be ridiculous. Now, with modern communication and internet, I believe authors can be protected by copyright and, on average, they will receive more royalties than when the marketplace is restricted.

Once again I say that this, of course, will not help your business which relies on territorial restrictions. Surely you can see, that with the modern internet and communications, changes will have to take place.

Regards Dick Smith

Dear Dick

You can't protect authors' interests without providing territorial copyright to them and their publishers. That's why virtually all Australian authors and their agents strongly support retention of the current system.

Nor, in the book marketplace, is there any confusion about what territorial copyright means: it refers to the territory controlled by nation-states, in which the rule of law applies.

Try telling the Americans and the British that they should abandon territorial copyright. They'd laugh you out of the room.

By the way, I've had many conversations with US and UK publishers and literary agents about this subject over the last year or so — including with some who would theoretically benefit from the change you support. Not one of them could understand how an Australian government would even contemplate abandoning territorial copyright.

I don't believe that the internet will weaken territorial ties. If anything, I think it will strengthen them, as rights-holders become even more cautious about the terms and conditions under which they license those rights.

Best wishes

Henry Rosenbloom

Dear Henry … Dear Dick: now read on

2009-10-31T07:08:10Z

On 30 October, Dick Smith replied to my email to him which I'd sent earlier that day (see my previous post to this blog). A couple of hours later – while still in Athens – I replied. Here is that exchange.

Dear Henry

Thanks for your email of today.

I would wager that every single component used in your publishing business has been purchased through a competitive marketplace. By this I mean your printing equipment, photocopying equipment, telephone equipment – everything used in your office and production facilities.

I am also confident that you would be outraged if Dick Smith Electronics, or indeed any other business, colluded to stifle competition.

Further, I would assume that when you went to purchase your last washing machine or television you understood that Australian business has to compete in the world’s marketplace – in fact, that’s probably why you would have had the opportunity to purchase the goods at such a low price.

Perhaps you remember I owned my own independent publishing house – “Australian Geographic”. I owned it for about ten years and then sold it for over $40 million to Fairfax. Not at any time did I have any problem in competing with overseas publishers. At that time I was totally opposed to import restrictions on books, and I still am.

I happen to love competition, and because Australia has benefited so much from it’s opening to world markets, I am happy to accept some of the disadvantages which accompany globalisation.

I will support import restrictions for books if you will support import restrictions for products that I would like to produce in the future for my own financial gain.

Regards Dick Smith

Dear Dick

Thank you for your quick response. I can see that you are well-intentioned, but I still think you are misinformed. Perhaps that is why your reply is rhetorical, and does not address the specific points I made.

Territorial copyright is not akin to tariff protection. It is more like sovereignty: without it, no nation can safeguard its own interests. In commercial terms, it is much more like patent law, which provides essential certainty to the originators of intellectual property.

For book publishers who buy and sell in the international marketplace, territorial copyright is the bedrock for all their activities. That is why the parallel importation of books is forbidden in such havens of free-market economics as the United States and the United Kingdom.

The arguments that I and my fellow publishers make against parallel imports are not based on fear of competition from overseas books; they come, instead, from our understanding that a large source of our business will be removed if we are unable to have guaranteed access to our own territory when we acquire overseas-originated books or sell Australian books to overseas territories.

Your Australian Geographic business, admirable as it was - which I vividly recall you establishing and building up - is not a comparable model. It would have been, had you tried to engage in international trade within it - then you would have quickly learned how important territorial copyright is. I should add that, given you were producing a narrow range of Australian-themed and -branded items, it was never subject to the general trade conditions that I am talking about.

The argument for the retention of parallel-import restrictions is not about restricting competition. If it were as simple as that, the Productivity Commission would have said so, and the decision to abandon the restrictions would have been made years ago. It is essentially about the necessary conditions for any book-publishing industry to have the confidence and the income to invest in books and authors within its own market.

You say in your accompanying letter to the ceo of the Australian Publishers Association that 'big multinationals' have been 'ripping off Australian consumers with inflated prices'. Speaking as a non-big mini-national, I feel bound to tell you that this is simply not true. Book publishing (and retailing) operates on very skinny margins, and our book prices merely reflect all the basic conditions of our economy, especially our size and our wage levels. In particular, whether our book prices seem high or low relative to, say, US book prices, is largely dependent on the exchange rate of the Australian dollar. Given that the main course in a restaurant costs more than a 450pp large paperback, Australian book prices are, in fact, relatively modest.

Finally, I must add that neither I nor my fellow publishers have been 'manipulated or brain-washed' into making such arguments, as you assert in your letter to the APA. I have written many thousands of words on this subject, in two submissions to the Productivity Commission, in several posts to my blog, and in other communications. They are all - for better worse - all my own work, independently arrived at and expressed. The alternative is truer: we know our industry, but you are the victim of an ideology.

Best wishes

Henry Rosenbloom

Mr Smith lobbies Canberra

2009-10-30T14:28:37Z

On 29 October 2009, Dick Smith, a well-known former Australian entrepreneur and adventurer, sent an email letter to federal members of parliament, headed 'Removal of Import Restrictions on Books in Australia'. His email (which is attached below) was sent to the media by Cato Counsel, lobbyists and public-relations advisers to the so-called 'Coalition for Cheaper Books'.

I received a copy of Mr Smith's letter while I was overseas, preparing to return after a post-Frankfurt break. I immediately felt compelled to write a reply, which I've reproduced - in slightly edited form - below. The subject that both letters deal with is under heated debate within the federal government as it seeks to decide its position in response to the Productivity Commission report that it commissioned. You can read Mr Smith's letter here.

Dear Mr Smith

I have long admired your public-spiritedness, but your recent letter to MPs about import restriction on books is plain wrong on every argument you make.

We are an independent Australian book-publishing house that I founded more than 30 years ago, and I can tell you that we - and fellow independents - would suffer the most if your suggestion was adopted by the federal government. My own company is regarded as an industry leader (we have twice won the Small Publisher of the Year award), and I assure you that the foreign-owned publishers you excoriate would cope, but that the independents would be placed in severe jeopardy. We all depend on territorial copyright to support and buttress our overall publishing programme; without it, our turnover and profitability would plunge, we would have little to sell or buy, and diminished means to do so. This would have a knock-on negative effect on Australian authors, independent booksellers, book printers, writers' festivals, the media, and the Australian reading public.

Ironically, if parallel imports were allowed, the country as a whole would be more subject to the whims of multinational publishers - not less. Only this time, the decisions would be made in New York, and not in Sydney or Melbourne. And the booksellers that would benefit most would be from the big end of town.

Believe it or not, there is no certainty, or even likelihood, despite the Productivity Commission's best efforts, that allowing the parallel imports of books would lower prices. The government has already implicitly accepted this point, as has the so-called Coalition for Cheaper Books, which has sniffed the political wind and has abandoned its previous fervid advocacy for this change.

Even your example of Amazon sales is wrong. Amazon and other on-line booksellers would continue to have a GST-free competitive advantage, even if parallel imports were allowed. The argument is not about on-line sales vs bookshop sales. It is about local bookshops' access to foreign-originated 'product'. In particular, it is about a grab for increased market share by Dymocks and huge retailers such as Woolworths.

I wish you had informed yourself about this subject adequately before campaigning on it, and then allowing your name to be used - by lobbyists for the big chains - on the wrong side of a vital argument for the nation.

Henry Rosenbloom

Seeing Life Through The Wire

2009-09-13T11:55:19Z

Earlier this year I watched all 60 episodes of The Wire via a five-set DVD package I’d bought from Amazon. Conceived and mostly written by former police reporter David Simon, the show originally ran for five seasons on the US’s cable network HBO until 2008.

It made a profound impact on me. Many laudatory comments have been written and uttered about this extraordinary television series since it screened in the United States (including by President Obama), and most of them are justified. Apart from the fact that you’ll appreciate the first few episodes more by turning on the English sub-title facility (which I wish I’d realised), it has a depth and breadth that is rare in any medium, let alone television.

The writing, casting, acting, and production values are exceptional. But, more importantly, it a fully realised, integrated, and highly disturbing portrayal of what most us prefer not to know or think about the modern city.

While the show is ostensibly about life, work, and death in Baltimore, it is really about endemic corruption and the vanity of human wishes. Each institution it scrutinises — whether it’s the police force, city hall, the stevedores’ union, the education sector, or the newspaper industry — is engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, in a conspiracy against its decent members and the public at large.

In this universe, statistics are always being fudged and manipulated, grudges and vendettas are always being pursued, the wrong people are being shafted or promoted, the good guys usually have bad motivations, and the bad guys are often better than everyone else.

Violence is a way of life, pursued with insouciant, breathtaking brutality. Whether it’s the local drug-dealers or the various mafia engaged in big business, the rules of civil society don’t apply to them. In between the protection they’ve bought and the subservience they enforce, they are lords of all that they survey — until they overstep.

Virtually nobody gets the fate they deserve, and everything gets inexorably worse. Of all the bad things that happen in this series, the killings are the worst. All of them are shocking, as you might imagine, but the hardest to take involve the slaying of those who should be beyond our sympathies — drug dealers and hard-core criminals. In fact, the individuals with the most admirable characters and codes of honour turn out to be the ones we would ordinarily dismiss as beneath our contempt.

This is a searing, deeply uncomfortable vision of urban life in the modern world. Seen through the unblinking eyes of its creators, the average citizen is merely fodder for these vast forces playing their own ruthless, predatory games. No institution is reliable, no politician is credible, no friend is durable.

Once you’ve absorbed and understood the messages of The Wire, it’s hard to see your own society in the same way again. Where I’m writing this, for instance — in Melbourne, Australia — we’ve heard any number of narratives that now sound familiar. We’ve got a health minister in the state government who claims not to have known that public hospitals around the city have been inventing patient numbers and treatment statistics for years. We’ve got a Country Fire Authority that managed not to warn rural and outer-suburban residents of catastrophic threats to their homes and lives last summer. We’ve got a government that won’t tell people that the city is running out of water, while it commits to emergency measures that can mean nothing else.

Around the country, take your pick. There are non-stop sleazy deals between developers and whoever they need to pay off; ex-politicians lobbying their former colleagues for outrageous favours on behalf of their corporate clients; large corporates growing more and more powerful while pumping out blander and blander advertising campaigns; and cynical training rackets for foreign students, in which the governments desperate for income and the purely mercenary ‘service providers’ both have a vested interest in lying about what they’re doing.

And that’s not even talking about entrenched police corruption, out-of-control violence on the streets, tabloid newspapers and television ‘current affairs’ programs that are getting tackier and tackier, or a culture that is becoming dumber and dumber. Or global-warming denialism, which is a way of dancing with the stars while the planet burns.

And yet, it’s not the whole story. Against the odds, and despite being treated like rubbish, there are many people who live modest lives, who care about real things, and who try to help others. There are even politicians — I know some myself — who are incorruptible, and who are committed to public life as a way to improve their society.

There is a tremendous core decency to Australians. Perhaps that is why we have tended to think of ourselves as less corrupt and more moral than other Western societies. This is, to some extent, a comforting — and perhaps necessary — illusion. Individuals, as well as societies, need to maintain their self-esteem to be able to function.

I suspect that Americans would say the same about themselves, and that this is one of the reasons that The Wire never attracted high ratings, even while it was garnering critical praise. It is determinedly non-redemptive and non-comforting, and there’s only so much of this that most people can bear.

The Wire is a complex, multi-layered television novel, in an era when fewer and fewer real novels are being written and read. Like the best of its nineteenth-century predecessors, it tells its own truths in an unforgettable way, and the ripples it sends out never seem to stop lapping our shores.

Henry Rosenbloom

Sociopaths in Suits: the Productivity Commission goes for broke

2009-07-15T12:17:31Z

This is how a civilisation commits suicide these days: it invites sociopaths in suits to dismantle its culture.

With its recommendation that territorial copyright for books be abandoned, the Productivity Commission’s final report is the apotheosis of neo-liberalism in Australia. Everything is to be sacrificed to the workings of the free market — especially writers, independent booksellers, independent publishers, and the nation’s cultural integrity. The community as a whole will benefit, the commission says, and that is all that matters.

This was always going to be the commission’s stance, whatever the evidence. As I wrote at the time, the fix was in the moment that the commission was given its brief. Now, after many months of obfuscation and pretend-consultations, the commission has come clean: it’s all about price. And the commission just knows, as it always has, that book prices are too high because of territorial copyright.

But getting from there to here has been unexpectedly difficult. The commission’s draft report — with its yawning gap between evidence and recommendations, and its ludicrous support for a 12-month limit to territorial copyright — was universally and rightly derided. Its final report is better argued and more plausible, but it is a triumph of style over substance. Its tone is reasonable, its method and conclusions more internally consistent, but its stance exposes a brutal underlying ideology that still ignores any inconvenient evidence that cuts across its trust in the market.

You can get a flavour of this, strangely enough, in the commission’s dismal attempts to discuss the cultural benefits of books. This is so pedestrian, so utilitarian a section, that it is painful to read. It represents a doffing of the cap by the commission to recognising the personal, intrinsic value of books, before it gets on to the main game of hitting the industry as hard as it can.

In its draft report, the commission acknowledged that allowing parallel imports on a cold-turkey basis would cause too much damage to the industry. Now, it’s decided that the damage is tolerable, at least to it. What’s changed in the meantime? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission has been so stung by the virulence of the criticism of its draft report that it has decided to teach the industry a lesson.

The commission has now recommended the wreaking of havoc to the book industry on the sole ground that abandoning territorial copyright, and allowing the parallel importation of books, will lower the price of books. Its evidence for this claim comes from its studies of book prices, which show that — as many of us said at the onset of the inquiry — they fluctuate according to the exchange rates between the Australian and US & UK currencies. The lower the Australian dollar, the lower book prices are here, and vice versa.

The commission itself has previously acknowledged that the average price gap between local and overseas English-language editions is eliminated if exchange rates of GBP 0.41 and USD 0.67 are used (which is very close to the average of the last 10 years). In its most recent study, for the period July 2008 to May 2009, it finds that, in RRP terms, the price of the cheapest available edition of titles in Australia is, on average, 13 per cent higher than the lowest-cost UK edition, and 27 per cent higher than the US lowest-cost edition.

You might think, as the commission does, that this is an open-and-shut case. As it happens, it isn’t. Even ignoring the fact that the commission can’t be sure it has compared like-with-like editions — so that a smaller-format, more cheaply produced US edition isn’t being compared with a larger, higher-quality local edition — there’s a key cost-component missing.

In its study of comparative book prices, the commission has not included the cost of overseas freight. This crucial fact is hidden in the commission’s language: it says that it ‘has not sought to adjust retail prices to reflect differences in freight costs’. These are highly misleading weasel words, so close to a lie as to be indistinguishable from one. The commission hasn’t excluded ‘differences’ in freight costs — it has excluded them completely. And yet the cost of shipping books from the UK or US to Australia is significant, and would be a vital factor in the setting of book prices if the commission’s recommendations were accepted. At average freight-costs and at current exchange rates, overseas books would be more expensive than locally produced ones — not less.

This is why the commission has been forced to concede that its price comparisons, ‘do not of themselves attempt to indicate the price at which the books sold in other countries could have been sold in Australia’.

So what is the point of them? The commission is free to assume a frictionless universe — where books magically appear at no cost thousands of kilometres from their point of origin — but nobody else can. Bookshops certainly couldn’t and wouldn’t.

This is a disgraceful sleight-of-hand by the commission. The whole basis of its assertion that Australian book prices are higher because of the operation of parallel-import restrictions — and that they would drop with the abandonment of PIRs — is phoney. This is typical of its whole approach. It knows it can’t prove its case, so the best it can do is exclude vital evidence and continue to assert that that PIRs are responsible for a mystical ‘upward pressure on prices’.

Even using its partial and pre-determined approach, the best argument it can come up with now is that abandoning PIRs would provide ‘opportunities, from time to time, for the importation and sale of at least a subset of books at lower prices from abroad … [and that] movements in the currency would, in the absence of those restrictions, occasionally provide opportunities for Australian booksellers to source some stock quite cheaply from markets such as the US.’

This is what is behind its headline recommendations: a pathetic assertion that some of the time, in some circumstances, some booksellers might be able to import cheaper books. And to achieve this highly conditional benefit, argued on specious grounds, it has recommended a radical change that would devastate the publishing industry and its authors, and along with it an important component of Australian life and culture.

The sociopaths in suits have had their say. This is now a political problem for the federal government, as it deserves to be. It sent the brief to the commission, so the report is its child. How the Rudd government deals with the report will be a crucial test of its leader’s disavowal of the anti-social ideology of neo-liberalism — and of its connectedness to its own community.

Henry Rosenbloom

The upward pressure of a closed mind: the PC's roadmap to ruin

2009-04-21T05:11:30Z

What follows is Scribe's supplementary submission to the Productivity Commission, written and sent in response to the commission's 'Discussion Draft', which was released on 20 March 2009. I found the draft to be a disgraceful and remarkably poor piece of work. If it had been submitted to us as a publishing proposal, we would have rejected it outright; and I strongly suspect that, if it were submitted as an essay in the economics/commerce faculty of any reputable university, it would be failed. The commission is due to send its final recommendation to the federal government on 13 May.

The commission’s draft report is a botched job: it is unsafe, unsound, and unreliable. It demonstrates fundamental ignorance about the industry it has been investigating, it makes findings that are not supported by the evidence it adduces, and it makes recommendations that it recognises would damage the interests of Australian authors, booksellers, printers, and publishers — all because it has an a priori belief that a greater good would result from the loosening or abandonment of parallel-import restrictions.

Ultimately, the draft assumes what it is incapable of proving, and relies on that assumption to recommend draconian changes to the existing regulation of a successful and important cultural industry.

The commission pays lip-service to the submissions it received (over 95 per cent of which supported the retention of territorial copyright) by quoting widely from them and then ignoring them. It masks its inadequacies by using a language that only economists could love (‘cultural externalities’), while proving tone-deaf to the inspired prose of writers such as Tim Winton and the thoughtful, honest writings of individuals with decades of experience in the industry.

What is worse, the draft report doesn’t face up to the fact that the case for the prosecution has collapsed. Of the two grounds for the inquiry — supposed problems with the ready availability and the prices of overseas-originated titles — the draft report effectively abandons the first charge.

Of the second charge, after labouring mightily, the commission has produced a mouse: it demonstrates that local book prices are competitive at the average $US–$Australian exchange rate of the past decade. Neither the supposed killer example of New Zealand’s experience after it abandoned parallel-import restrictions, nor the distortions of the Dymocks-led ‘Coalition for Cheaper Books’ turn out to be persuasive. The commission has been forced to recognise that there is no supporting evidence for the second charge, either.

Even so, the commission avers that parallel-import restrictions must be responsible for ‘an upward pressure on prices’. Why does it say this? Because it ‘knows’ on prima facie grounds that this is what happens when free markets are impeded. In the absence of forensic evidence, it relies on supposition and suspicion as a basis for proceeding.

This begs the basic question, of course: why call for submissions, at all, apart from fulfilling the need to demonstrate that due process has been followed?

Let there be no mistake about it. The case for the commission’s prosecution of the industry boils down to a pre-existing belief that PIRS produce a tendency to raise prices and hence to cause economy-wide damage. This belief underpins the commission’s imperviousness to the evidence, and explains its insouciance about the adverse consequences of its draft recommendations. It is simply not interested in the details of what it regards as collateral damage.

Not surprisingly, the commission’s recommendations are awesome in their otherworldliness. They reflect an almost complete lack of feel for what goes on inside the lowly paid, high-risk, low-reward publishing industry: the long-term investments it makes in authors, employees, and titles, and its irreplaceable role in transmitting culture and a sense of community to its readers and participants. The commission regards publishing as akin to textile manufacturing, albeit with an extra ‘cultural’ element. In its eyes, an industry is an industry is an industry.

The commission cannot even bring itself to say straightforwardly that the beneficiaries of its recommendations — the US and the UK — protect their national cultures and publishing industries by prohibiting parallel imports. (In post-draft discussions, the commission dismissed this high-mindedly as an example of what not to do if one wishes to follow free-market principles.)

And because the commission does not understand the industry, it feels able to recommend a re-engineering of it that, as it happens, would make everything worse. Even then, if the industry still has a pulse, the commission proposes coming back after five years and completing the process of ‘liberalisation’.

The commission’s central recommendation to maintain PIRs for twelve months is not just unjustified; it is inept. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relative revenues that authors and publishers derive from front-list and back-list sales. And it is a figleaf for a convoluted, backdoor abandonment of territorial copyright that would, in the process, distort the industry into a shape that would be unrecognisable locally and internationally.

This is death by a thousand cuts. The commission, in effect, is urging the national government to bring into being a publishing industry that would be much smaller, with a reduced local list, and which printed fewer copies of each new title (in an irony typical of the draft report, these lowered print-runs would increase unit costs and hence retail prices). As a result, independent publishers, local authors, and literary agents would face diminished prospects, and lowered incomes and revenues; some independent booksellers would be forced out as the large chains got even bigger and imported more mass-market titles; local book-printing would decline, and printing jobs would be exported; and, of course, there’d be a significant rise in unemployment.

As well, the decades-long battle for the splitting of Australian territorial rights from UK and Commonwealth rights would be over. Australia would revert to being a post-colonial dumping ground for US and UK ‘product’, where what we get to read would become more dependant than ever on the whimsies of export-sales departments in New York and London.

This is an impressive amount of destruction to wreak, on the sole ground that the commission believes that the retention of territorial copyright causes a tendency for prices to rise. One wonders what it would have recommended if it had any proof. Nationalisation? Transportation to England with forced labour?

The truth is that the current regulations work remarkably well, but that the commission is constitutionally unable to face the consequences of this fact. Its job, after all, is to recommend reforms, not to award commendations for good performance or to preserve the status quo. Throughout its draft report, it is apparent that the commission was always going to recommend change of some kind, come what may. Its only problem is that the gap between the evidence and its recommendations requires a leap of bad faith.

The draft has succeeded in only one thing: it has aroused the fury and scorn of the entire publishing industry and its stakeholders, and among many readers and those who care about the place of the written word in Australian culture.

It is possible, of course, that the commission will want to change course in its final recommendations. It may revert to recommending the total abandonment of territorial copyright, or it might be tempted to fine-tune its grand design for Australian publishing. Either approach is bound to have catastrophic consequences.

Whatever it ends up recommending, I believe the commission has destroyed its own credibility on this subject. Its discussion draft demonstrates the folly of subjecting a complex cultural industry to the tender mercies of a neo-liberal economic inquisition. It is hard to imagine that a Labor government, let alone a national parliament, could accept such devastation being wrought on the flimsiest of pretexts and for such non-existent or marginal benefits.

Henry Rosenbloom

The unproductive Productivity Commission

2009-03-22T11:49:41Z

The story so far:

The Productivity Commission is investigating whether or under what conditions imported editions of English-language books should be allowed to compete with Australian editions. There are two main reasons for the inquiry having been set up: the suspicion that a broad range of overseas editions are not being made available to local consumers quickly enough; and a belief that overseas editions are or would be cheaper than local versions.

The commission is the government’s free-market facilitator. It likes nothing more than sinking its teeth into anti-competitive or inefficient arrangements that impose undue burdens on consumers and taxpayers. So the mere fact that the book industry was referred to it by the government was a clear indication that, at the least, ‘reform’ of some kind was expected.

The commission knew next to nothing about the industry when it embarked on its ‘study’, but that didn’t bother it. After all, it has all-purpose economic-analysis skills at its disposal, as well as bullshit detectors that have stood the test of time.

So the commission launched into its typical inquiry process by calling for public submissions. It received over 270; many of them were detailed and thoughtful, and presented evidence as well as arguments to make their case.

There were eloquent submissions from some of Australia’s best-known and most successful authors. There were powerful submissions from publishers large and small. There were impressive submissions from industry bodies such as the Australian Booksellers Association, the Leading Edge group of independent booksellers, the Australian Publishers Association, and the Copyright Agency of Australia.

Over 95 per cent of the submissions opposed allowing parallel imports.

There was also overwhelming evidence that new books from the US and UK were readily available in Australia (although not as quickly as some booksellers would like). There was persuasive evidence that the prices of local editions were, in the main, cheaper than US editions (although this inevitably fluctuates with the $A-$USD exchange rate).

The only exception to the latter point came from the jerry-rigged ‘Coalition for Cheaper Books’, a front run by Dymocks, whose submission was distinguished by the way it sneered at publishers and used dodgy figures from a frictionless universe.

In other words, the basis for the inquiry was shown to be unwarranted. There is no withholding of new titles. There is no consumer rip-off.

As well, the submissions revealed that there is almost no constituency for the abandonment of territorial copyright or the introduction of parallel imports. The industry submissions made it clear that they regard the retention of territorial copyright as essential to the existence of Australian publishing. Even booksellers support this point— around 65 per cent of booksellers by market share came out against the mooted reforms.

This was extremely inconvenient for the commission. It has a hatchet-job to do, but it doesn’t have the evidence to justify wielding the weapon.

So what does it do? The commission has just produced a ‘discussion draft’ that tries to square the circle.

It concedes that the timely and wide availability of books is not a problem, and doesn’t even argue that local editions are more expensive than imported books would be (the most it says on this subject is that the existing parallel-import restrictions ‘put upward pressure on prices’ — whatever that means). It even buys the industry arguments about the central importance of territorial copyright.

Nevertheless, it’s in the business of removing impediments to the operation of free markets. So its central draft recommendation is that territorial copyright should apply only for 12 months from the date of first publication of a book in Australia. ‘Thereafter, it says, ‘parallel importation should be freely permitted.’ And after five years, the industry should be investigated again.

This has to be the most cynical, insouciant, and bizarre recommendation that the Productivity Commission has ever made. It pretends to retain territorial copyright while setting up conditions that would effectively destroy it — and the Australian publishing industry.

Why? Because it is unworkable and absurd. How can publishers acquire rights to books from the United States that have a duration of one year? How can publishers sell rights to books by Australian authors, knowing that a year later they will face competition from the very editions they’ve licensed? Why would publishers market foreign-sourced books, bring authors out to tour, and maintain backlist stocks, if their rights could be taken away from them in one year?

Read my lips: copyright means copyright; investment needs certainty; commitment has to be reciprocal.

None of the submissions even hinted at such a reform. This is a crazy idea that has been made in Canberra, by a commission that has learned just enough about the book business to be dangerous.

You get a hint of the contortions that the commission is engaging in by looking at how it deals with a fundamental political problem. The United States and the United Kingdom are the countries where our parallel imports would come from, but they don’t allow them in their own territories. This is not exactly the level playing field beloved of neo-liberal economists. The commission, sensitive to this potential impediment, is therefore carefully misleading about US and UK laws on this subject: it describes these two biggest English-language territories as ‘also having parallel-import restrictions, although without time requirements for first publication’. This is a cute, elongated way to obscure the fact that the UK and UK don’t limit parallel imports — they prohibit them.

You also get a hint of what a manipulative game the commission is playing when you realise that it handed its interim report to selected media before posting it on its website, or alerting those individuals and organisations who have a direct stake in this debate, and who put so much thought and effort into writing submissions. The media were not allowed to show the document to ‘third parties’, or to seek comments from them, before writing their pieces. Accordingly, reports such as The Sydney Morning Herald’s travelled around the country and the world, unencumbered by alternative points of view.

Who knows what the commission is really thinking? If it intends its central recommendation to be taken seriously, it’s seriously deluded. If it has floated this for it to be punctured, consider it done. My worry is that what lies behind it is the naked intent that it’s trying to hide.

Now we’re all meant to continue this punch-and-judy show by making further submissions, before a final recommendation is made to government in May.

This is what passes for public policy-making in Australia in 2009.

Henry Rosenbloom

State of Play: the parallel-imports inquiry

2009-02-23T12:40:51Z

The Productivity Commission is now chewing over the initial submissions it received to its inquiry into the idea of allowing the parallel importation of foreign-originated books. This is what it’s faced with:

• the commission has received 268 submissions to its inquiry, of which around 260 oppose the idea;

• in a historic shift, most booksellers — the supposed beneficiaries of parallel imports — have dropped their support for the proposal: around 65 per cent of booksellers by market share now oppose the idea, including the Australian Booksellers Association and the Leading Edge group of independent booksellers;

• every publisher opposes the idea — from the largest multinational to the smallest independent — and many of them have submitted lengthy, detailed, and well-argued explanations for their stance;

• apart from universal rejections from authors and literary agents, even the Copyright Agency thinks it’s a very bad idea; and

• there are only two substantial submissions in favour of the idea: from the so-called Coalition for Cheaper Books, which is a front run by Dymocks, and includes the discount department stores; and from the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, which argues for the ‘reform’ on economic-rationalistl first principles.

Nearly everybody who understands the industry is alarmed that the unilateral surrendering of territorial copyright would severely weaken Australian publishers and independent booksellers, damage the welfare of authors and Australia’s literary culture, and devastate ancillary activities and industries.

Even the handful of submissions in favour of the idea don’t attempt to argue on one of the main grounds for the inquiry being set up — that allowing parallel imports would increase the timeliness and availability of foreign-originated books in the Australian market. This is undoubtedly because they know that the current provisions have worked very well to make a wide range of overseas titles available promptly.

The sole economic argument is based on the belief that parallel imports would allow ‘cheaper books for everyone’. And yet even this isn’t true. At I’ve argued previously, at a $US–$Australian exchange rate $A0.67 to $US1.00, booksellers have to multiply US prices by an average of around 2.2 to arrive at an Australian recommended retail price inclusive of GST. This makes locally printed Australian editions of US-originated books cheaper than imports of the US edition. There are countless examples of this marketplace reality provided in various publishers’ submissions to the inquiry.

Under a parallel-import regime, this would not change. In fact, as one of the consequences would be the removal of competition in the local book-printing industry, the cost of manufacturing books — and hence of selling them — would go up. This doesn’t even take account of the consequences of larger chain booksellers forcing out independents: hardly anybody in the industry seriously thinks that this would result in lower book prices, or an increased range of titles.

As many submissions show, the argument to abandon territorial copyright in order to reduce the retail price of books is not sustainable. It is not supported by the facts on the ground and, ultimately, is hostage to foreign-currency exchange rates and the behaviour of booksellers. Of course, if the Australian dollar were to strengthen considerably against the US dollar, local prices would become higher. But this is not, to put it mildly, a sound basis for public policy, or for making such a major change to existing policy.

Some attempt is made by the ‘pro’ forces to argue that authors could prevent foreign remaindered or run-on editions of their books appearing in Australia by stipulating this in their contracts with overseas publishers. This is simply misguided: no contractual arrangements between authors and publishers could stop remainders being exported to Australia by third parties. To understand the author’s perspective on the subject in depth, I recommend Tim Winton’s magnificent submission.

The overwhelming body of evidence has demonstrated that allowing the parallel importation of books would cause massive damage for no appreciable gain. This is not what was meant to happen — the subject was originally referred to the Productivity Commission via the Council of Australian Governments by a newly minted Labor prime minister on the assumption that there’d be widespread support for change, and that the commission, a champion of economic rationalism, would deliver a saleable ‘reform’ to the government.

Instead, what was meant to be a lay-down misere has turned into a hospital hand-pass. The economy is now in terrible trouble, and Kevin Rudd has decided that neo-liberalism is a bad thing. The commission may still recommend the abandonment of territorial copyright, of course. But could the Rudd government embark on a draconian, neo-liberal course of action that the vast majority of experts are certain would endanger the industry and the culture? Watch this space.

PS: I urge interested readers to examine the various submissions on the commission’s website at www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/books/submissions. In particular, I recommend the submissions from Peter Carey and Tim Winton; the Australian Publishers Association (and individual houses such as Penguin, Random House, Text, Scribe, and Allen & Unwin, as well as the individual submission from A&U’s chairman, Patrick Gallagher); and the Leading Edge group of booksellers. Collectively, these are a magnificent set of presentations.

Henry Rosenbloom

Reconsidering parallel imports #2: the trouble with Bob Carr

2008-12-17T11:36:24Z

Recently, a former Labor premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, published an argument for cheaper books (‘The Forum’, Weekend Australian 13-14 December 2008). His piece displays just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and enough insouciance and ignorance to be breathtaking.

Let’s be clear what’s going on here. Mr Carr is seeking to justify the abandonment of territorial copyright for Australian publishers and authors on the grounds that it would result in cheaper books across the board. This is a powerful, simple rationale — which, as it happens, is plain wrong. But even if it were right, it ignores the devastating costs of such a radical move. His pitch is seductive because it is simplistic and selective.

To take Mr Carr’s main argument at face value, I find it extraordinary that, for a person who sits on the board of a book-retailing chain, he doesn’t seem to understand the first thing about book pricing or the book industry. He quotes, amongst his examples of apparent local rip-offs, the fact that The White Tiger sells for $32.95 in Australia, but only $21.53 in the US and $30.70 in Britain. Apart from the fact that he hasn’t added GST to the overseas prices (which immediately makes the UK edition dearer), he doesn’t mention that booksellers would have to get copies of a US title such as this into Australia in order to sell them.

To do so, booksellers have to pay for freight, compensate themselves for having to buy copies on a firm basis (not on sale-or-return basis, as they do locally) and, in the process of converting their costs from US dollars to Australian dollars, add a buffer to protect themselves against adverse currency fluctuations. The nett result of these practical factors is that, at the current $US-$Australian exchange rate, booksellers, like Mr Carr’s very own Dymocks group, multiply US prices by around 2.2 to arrive at an Australian recommended retail price inclusive of GST. Thus The White Tiger, which costs US$14.00 in America, would retail here for $30.80, assuming that booksellers didn’t round the price up — a maximum potential saving of $2.15.

In fact, most of the time, Australian editions of US-originated books sell for less than the US edition would if it were able to be imported by booksellers. Let me give you a few examples. We have just published Obama’s Challenge, by Robert Kuttner, a US paperback that retails for US$14.95 in its home country. If booksellers were able to import it, they would charge $32.95 for it. Our recommended retail price is $27.95.

We have also just published a small-format paperback of The Canon by Natalie Angier. The US retail price of $15.95 would become $35.00 in local booksellers’ hands. Our price: $27.95.

We publish many local editions of US-originated titles, and most of the time they demonstrate the same price disparity in Australia’s favour. But, what is even more extraordinary, Mr Carr doesn’t seem to have noticed that Australian consumers get the further benefit of having paperback editions available to them instantly instead of the expensive hardbacks that US publishers originate.

Thus, for example, next month we’re publishing ‘A Long Time Coming’ by Evan Thomas and Newsweek journalists, a book about the recent US election campaign. In the US, it will be published as a US$22.95 hardback, which would have an Australian RRP of $49.95. Instead, we’re publishing our edition as a paperback for $27.95.

Similarly, early in 2009 we’re publishing Legacy of Secrecy, by Lamar Waldron, an 864-page book on the Kennedy assassination. In the US, it’s just been released as a US$33.00 hardback, which would be priced here at around $72.50. We’re publishing it as a paperback for $45.00.

There are countless examples such as these available to demonstrate how Australian consumers continually benefit from the availability of what is called the trade paperback.

But even comparing like with like — hardback with hardback — local pricing is often keener. I notice, for instance that the US edition of The Man Who Owns The News, by Michael Wolff, a recently released hardback biography of Rupert Murdoch, retails there for $US29.95. If the Knopf edition were to be imported by local booksellers, they would charge around $66.00 for it. Instead, the Australian edition, published by Random House, is priced at $49.95.

Whichever way you look at it, the argument to abandon territorial copyright in order to reduce the retail price of books is not sustainable. It is not supported by the facts on the ground and, ultimately, is hostage to foreign-currency exchange rates and the behaviour of booksellers. This is not, to put it mildly, a sound basis for making such a major change.

Mr Carr has one extra claim to support his case: the experience of New Zealand since it allowed parallel imports ten years ago. He says that their publishing industry has thrived since then. I don’t know of the report that he relies on, but I do know that this doesn’t resemble the New Zealand publishing industry I deal with. Books are more expensive there than here; their indigenous publishing has been stunted and starved; and the country is essentially treated as a dumping ground by multinational publishers. This is not a picture of a healthy or growing industry.

Which brings me to my main areas of disagreement with Mr Carr’s argument. He seems to have no awareness of the centrality of territorial copyright, the nature of Australian publishing, or where the best interests of authors, consumers, and the culture at large lie.

There is no publishing industry of any significance in the Western world that does not rely on exercising exclusive copyright in its own territory. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine an industry that could exist without such an enforceable right. In Australia, which for many decades suffered from being a neo-colonial outpost, it is especially important in enabling indigenous publishing — and everything that goes with it — to flourish. Like taxation, territorial copyright is one of the prices we pay for civilisation.

As I've noted in a previous blog on the subject, the current copyright rules, which were introduced in 1991, have led to the emergence of a vibrant book publishing industry. In fact, in terms of its market share, 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 is healthy. Whereas it was once a plaything of foreign-owned distributors, it has become a complex ecosystem, with multiple symbiotic relationships between publishers, booksellers, authors, writers’ festivals, and the media increasing all the time.

All of this is now at serious risk if the arguments of people like Bob Carr were to be listened to by the Productivity Commission or the Rudd government. There are two main ways, I think, in which the industry would be decimated if parallel imports were allowed.

Earlier, I gave examples of US-originated titles that publishers like us acquire regularly. We can only do this if we have a territory to buy — that is, if our own territory is available to us exclusively. Without the protection of territorial copyright, no local publisher would be able to make an offer for the right to publish overseas titles here with any confidence (as our print-runs could be undermined by booksellers importing competing editions, or by overseas publishers or distributors exporting their editions, especially if the exchange rate moves in their favour). We certainly could not afford to support the publishing of such titles with local marketing and promotional activities.

It’s also possible that US rights-holders (that is, publishers or literary agents) would be reluctant to license Australian rights at all, as they might be unnerved or emboldened by the prospect of UK editions competing with theirs in our market, or they might think they could do better by exporting their own editions.

Consequently, Australian local publishing programmes, which are underwritten by our access to profitable overseas-originated titles, would shrink: there would be a severe reduction in quantity and quality, and a forced emphasis on likely bestsellers.

Meanwhile, Australian publishers selling rights 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. For this reason as well, local publishers would not be able to afford to pay significant 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 so-called ‘30-day rule’ that currently protects copyright. Local authors and literary agents would be imperilled. Independent and serious booksellers would face a crippling loss of diversity and quality in their range. 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 consequences would follow from the imposition of Bob Carr’s simplistic solution in search of a problem. Dymocks, the company on whose board he sits, would be free to import whatever titles it wanted to, whenever it wanted to. Everybody else would be free to wander a blasted heath. Perhaps they should adopt the motto of ‘Import and be damned.’

Bob Carr also raises the issue of Australians increasingly buying books online at lower prices than local booksellers charge. This is true, but is a red herring. It has nothing to do with territorial copyright, and would remain a marketplace reality whatever regime were imposed. Its real significance is that it is an example of an unlevel playing field — a gift to Amazon and its ilk — as the government imposes no GST on online purchases, to the great disadvantage of local booksellers, let alone local publishers. This is a genuine reform crying out to be undertaken, which would have the added benefit of contributing to government revenues.

Mr Carr mentions that there’ve been five inquiries into this subject since 1988, and he hopes, exasperatedly, that this new one will be the last. A little humility might have led him to realise that the very fact that there have been no changes following so many inquiries is an indication that this is a highly complex subject, and that there might be good reasons why it has so far withstood the urgings of economic-rationalist zealots and the superficial attractions of free-market ‘reforms’.

Mr Carr concludes by saying that, ‘All expect reform to happen, the Productivity Commission to say, “Open the Market”, and the cabinet to agree.’ This is precisely what he has been lobbying for. The truth is that hardly anyone else in the industry — from multinational publishers to independent publishers, from authors to literary agents, from writers’ festival directors to most booksellers — agrees with this idea. But the fix is certainly in with the referral of this question to the Productivity Commission. If it proceeds as expected, Australian publishing will face an existential threat of the utmost severity.

It will be ironic indeed if an Australian Labor government listens to the siren-song of a failed ex-premier, and tries to resurrect market fundamentalism and deregulation at a time when the whole world is suffering terribly from the consequences of such a demonstrably asinine approach.

(A shorter version of this article appeared on ABC online at www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2450051.htm.

Mr Carr's article can be accessed online at www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24774541-26063,00.html)

To read my full submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into 'copyright restrictions on the parallel importation of books', download the PDF: Download

Over 200 submissions were sent to the commission by the due date of 20 January, and they came from a wide range of individuals and organisations. Following its evaluation of the submissions, the commission will release a draft report (in early March); arrange ‘roundtables’ to discuss the draft report (March–April); call for supplementary submissions (by 10 April); and issue a final report to government (13 May).

Henry Rosenbloom

Reconsidering parallel imports: a draconian solution in search of a problem

2008-11-30T16:59:43Z

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

Frankfurt 2008: the words to say it

2008-10-30T15:06:03Z

For the first time, Scribe has sent a three-person team to the Frankfurt Book Fair: at the recently concluded 2008 fair, our fiction acquisitions editor, Aviva Tuffield, and our translations editor, Margot Rosenbloom, accompanied me on the most stimulating and gruelling trip in world publishing.

The three of us took part in over 100 meetings with agents and publishers during the week of the fair, pitching our own wares and looking at those of others. We’ve already bought several terrific titles that we were shown, and offered for others, and there’s been serious interest expressed in a number of our books. At this early stage, it feels like our best Frankfurt yet.

We came across the usual bullying rights-buying behaviour by large UK houses, who keep insisting on acquiring Australian rights within the rubric of ‘UK and Commonwealth’ rights (as they’re so quaintly named) when they’re shown new titles. This is blackmail, pure and simple, as I've said before. By threatening to withdraw their offers, or not offer at all, unless these rights are made available to them, they gazump or freeze-out Australian publishers, sweep up Australian rights for next to nothing, pay low ‘export’ royalties, and thereby prop up their bottom lines effortlessly. Perhaps these rights should be renamed ‘UK and British Empire’ rights, because that’s their true neo-colonial basis.

Luckily, US publishers and agents are waking up to this rort, and are more prepared than ever to ‘split rights’, as it’s called, with Australian publishers. Even they face some difficulty, though, with their own UK sub-agents — who, in some cases, are extremely reluctant to have their work lives complicated by having to consider Australian offers and thereby antagonising the large UK publishers they depend on for a living.

When I said something to this effect last week to The Age’s book review editor, Jason Steger, and he incorporated my typically diplomatic comments in a piece he wrote for his column, I was astonished to see my words ricochet around the world. A recently launched UK industry email-newsletter, BookBrunch, promptly headlined a report of Steger’s column with the words ‘Rights holders — bastards and cowards’. Now I know what to do to get attention: talk like an Aussie.

Frankfurt was conducted against a backdrop of deepening anxiety about the world financial crisis, of course, but there were no obvious signs that this affected the number of participants or their buying-and-selling animal spirits. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that trade publishers, by their nature, tend to be optimistic and forward-looking. I was asked about this on Ramona Koval’s ‘Book Show’ on ABC radio national on 24 October, and found myself saying that, ‘You can’t just retreat ... and hide and cower until it’s all over. You still have to assume there’s a market for good books.’

As it turned out, our October ‘sales’ were very strong — above budget, and above the same month last year. I put the word ‘sales’ within quotation marks because, as readers of this blog will know, invoiced sales are not necessarily the same as bookshop sales. We were helped greatly by having a bestseller on our list — The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge — which has now been reprinted four times, with over 20,000 copies in print.

In the meantime, visits to our website keep growing, to a level that would have astonished me a year ago. I think this has got a lot to do with the widespread publicity that our new books keep generating, the breadth and depth of the list, and the richness of the site.

So, as financial Armageddon approaches, we gird our loins, and keep fighting the good fight.

Territorial rights and wrongs (aka perfidious Albion)

2008-03-25T10:55:44Z

There’s been an undeclared guerrilla war going on for several decades between UK publishers and Australian publishers. Like most wars, it’s being fought for the financial gains that go with territorial rights; unlike most wars, however, the aggressors have never tried to clothe their naked self-interest with ethical rhetoric. They’ve simply planted their flags in foreign lands because they can.

The problem starts in the United States, the home of much of the best writing in the English-speaking book world. When US publishers or literary agents seek to sell English-language rights to their authors’ books, they usually look first to the UK, which has a domestic market of 60 million people — and access to many more. Although the UK is very choosy about what it wants, this is where the big bucks are.

The trouble is that UK publishers have almost always insisted, when they acquire domestic rights, that so-called ‘Commonwealth’ rights — that part of the globe which used to be coloured red — be included. They’ve even tended to refuse to consider buying rights in books that originate in Australia.

Why? Because Australia is a highly profitable market for UK publishers. They usually don’t have to pay for the Commonwealth component when they acquire the rights; they get to pay the authors what are called ‘export royalties’ (which are around half of what are known as ‘home royalties); and they sometimes sell more copies here than they do in their own country. They don’t even have to publish the books here — simply distributing moderate quantities is still money for jam. The disproportionate profits go straight to their bottom lines, and help prop up their own ailing industry. This is rent-seeking and coupon-clipping on a grand scale.

It’s a wonderful rort, and it’s been going on for a long time. And the UK publishers protect it fiercely: if Australian publishers want to acquire rights to such books from the US (which requires what is known as ‘rights splitting’), the default position of UK houses is that they will then refuse to offer for UK rights. This is blackmail, to put it bluntly, and it usually works. Faced with the prospect of potentially losing a largeish UK deal over a small-to-middling ANZ deal, US publishers and agents — and their UK rights agents — have tended to fold and to cede the territory.

The UK houses are unapologetic about their behaviour. If pressed, they will simply aver that Australia is very important to them financially. This is certainly true, but that doesn’t make it edifying or defensible. It’s akin to nineteenth-century plantation owners claiming that slaves are essential to the profitable operation of their enterprises.

In recent years, despite the continuation of neo-colonial rule from London, an insurgency has emerged: Australian publishing has developed a rights-buying culture. Many houses, large and small, now look to acquire local rights in US titles. (Our own company has been prominent in this area.) Often, the books they’re interested in are of relatively little interest to UK houses; but, equally often, the UK refuses to abandon its hard-line position, because it doesn’t want to set an unwelcome precedent.

Every day of every week, Australian publishers offer for US books, only to hear that the publishers are holding out for a UK deal, or that the UK has already ‘pre-empted’ (made a knock-out offer for UK and Commonwealth rights that includes Australian rights). Sometimes the wait lasts for months — and there’s no UK bid forthcoming.

The galling thing is that Australia often understands US books better than UK publishers do — and that, when Australian houses do manage to acquire local rights, they often publish the books with verve and commercial success. They print substantial quantities, publicise the books professionally (sometimes bringing the author out for a publicity tour), and often create a market for an author that would otherwise never have existed. And they do this while paying a market price for the rights, and higher, domestic royalties to the US publishers and their authors.

Word of these successes has started to seep out more and more in the US publishing community. More US publishers and agents are nowadays prepared to split rights, and some UK houses, under this market-place pressure, are being forced to give ground: they will now acquire some books even after Australian rights have gone, and sometimes they find themselves forced to pay domestic royalty rates as the price of retaining their entitlement to Australian rights.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that most UK publishers regard themselves as entitled to Australia as a territory, and refuse to cede the ground. I’m convinced that they don’t understand the bitterness and deep resentment, bordering on fury, that this stance is arousing in Australian publishing. It is a refrain I hear constantly, whether I’m talking to colleagues in multinational houses or to fellow independents. There is no question in my mind that the UK’s position is not sustainable.

I understand very well that the UK book trade is in a sorry state, and that UK houses have come to rely on Australia to subsidise their often-marginal domestic operations. (It may even be the case that, without this subsidy, they’d be forced to resist the punitive discounts that they’re having to offer large retail chains.)

But we must put out own interests first. As in all neo-colonial enterprises, UK publishers, by protecting their own financial interests, are holding up the development of Australian publishing and the Australian book trade in general. To the extent that they prevent Australian publishing houses from reaching their potential, they weaken the financial base of our industry, and even the prospects of local authors.

UK publishers are not entitled to Australia as a territory. It is our country, our market, and our industry. They should either pay for it on the same terms and conditions that we do — and then make professional use of the publishing rights they acquire — or else bugger off and let us get on with it.

Henry Rosenbloom

[A slightly modified version of this piece first appeared in the Age on 24 March 2008, under the heading 'Brits in the bad books'.]

How publishers think

2007-09-24T22:27:29Z

The first thing to say is that I’ve got no idea how other publishers think, but this is what’s on my mind.

Being a publisher of trade books (that is, books for general readers which are sold by the book trade) is essentially an exercise in risk management. Whatever your tastes, abilities, and interests, you know automatically that most of the titles you publish will either lose money, break even, or earn a modest amount of money. On the other hand — in my experience — if you try to tailor your list to books you don’t like or care about, but that you think will make real money, you usually end up doing even worse.

So you have to temper your enthusiasm or even passion for the job with a kind of world-weary acceptance that the market place will always have its way with you. As a general rule, the more books you publish and print, the more will be returned unsold by the book trade. The best you can do is to try to spread the risk so that you can’t be brought undone by a big mistake or a series of run-of-the-mill disasters. At the same time, you can’t afford to think or publish defensively, as that would limit your horizons and imbue the whole enterprise with the spirit of defeatism.

What this means in practice, for an independent trade house without a multinational parent or majority owner, is that you have to keep a lid on advances and print-runs, while backing your imperfect judgement relentlessly, and publishing and promoting your list as effectively as possible. To put the same point a different way, the fastest way to go broke is to believe your own publicity by paying too much for books and printing too many of them. Publishers never have the luxury of forgetting about their mistakes: they eat away at their profit-and-loss statements, clog their warehouses, and have to be remaindered or pulped after a barely decent interval has passed.

Meanwhile, we’re continuously looking at many books and proposals from a wide array of sources — local authors and agents, and foreign publishers and agents — that demand a great deal of attention and, often, quick responses.

So a trade publisher has a lot to think about, including but not confined to the shape of his or her list, the state of the market, the performance of competitors, the wellbeing of their staff, the fate of their authors and, of course, the bottom line and the bank balance. There’s always a lot going on, and there’s never enough time to do everything that needs to be done.

This is what’s going on behind the scenes when authors submit unsolicited manuscripts or book proposals to publishers like us. It’s a fact universally acknowledged that an unsolicited manuscript has a very low chance of being of a publishable standard; that’s why it gets put, in the first instance, in what’s known as ‘the slush pile’. It’s very hard to justify putting scarce editorial resources into assessing such manuscripts. And yet — as numerous mistaken rejections by publishers around the world and throughout history have shown — it’s folly to treat them all as unworthy of consideration.

We've developed over time a system for coping with this dilemma. This is spelled out on 'Manuscript Submission', which you can reach by clicking on 'Submission Guidelines' on our home page.

First, we ask authors who meet our minimum qualifications to email us first before submitting. We do not read unsolicited material that arrives in the mail if the author has not emailed us first.

Second, if we ask to see sample material, we pay careful attention to the covering note and to the quality of the writing of the sample chapters, as well as to the content. Just as individuals notice and respond to body language when meeting somebody for the first time, an editor will immediately register how language is used by a new author. Punctuation, syntax, grammar, and tone all tell a story, for better or worse.

Proposals that are clearly inferior never get past this step. We reject them as soon and as briefly as possible, using uninformative language to convey the clear message that our decision is final. This, by the way, is what lies behind publishers’ apparently bland rejection letters which state that a proposal ‘does not suit our list’. This is an admittedly nonsensical formulation, but it does the job of conveying the message that the proposal has been rejected and that there’s no prospect of it being reconsidered .

As a general rule, the briefer the rejection letter, the harsher the publishing verdict behind it. Conversely, lengthy rejection letters usually indicate that the editor/publisher found genuinely likeable qualities in the writing, but not enough to overcome its weaknesses.

The worst kind of rejection letter, from a publisher’s point of view, is one that leaves room for a response by the author or her agent. This means fruitless correspondence is then entered into, and usually leaves both parties feeling even more unhappy. Sometimes, though, a retort is worth the pain. My favourite example of this was recently provided by an international publishing friend of mine, who rejected a proposal by a right-wing writer he despised. He wrote to the authors’ agent: ‘I would rather eat ricin than publish A.B.’ The agent replied: ‘A.B. tells me that she knows where to get you some.’

If we’re impressed by the sample material, we’ll ask to see the full manuscript, or as much of it as is available. At this third point in our sifting process, we come to the position I described at the beginning: trying to make a sound judgement and backing our instincts, while knowing that it’s impossible to be sure of the outcome.

Usually, at least two people, and sometime more, will be involved in this decision-making process. We try to make it a pre-condition for us deciding to offer for a manuscript that I or the acquiring editor love the writing. But love — in publishing, as in life — is not always enough. Sometimes you need good luck as well, or even just the absence of bad luck.

I should perhaps explain that, because of or despite what I’ve just written, we’re still expanding our list and acquiring more books than ever (although, admittedly, most of them are from published authors, both locally and overseas). Perhaps this is the triumph of hope over experience, but I still love acquiring good books and imagining how well we’ll publish them.

Henry Rosenbloom

We need to read about Kevin (twice)

2007-06-25T11:10:36Z

How’s this for a Guinness world record: we and another publisher have just published a book with the same title, on the same day, about the same person, with the same retail price. We’ve published Kevin Rudd by a journalist called Nicholas Stuart. Penguin have also published Kevin Rudd, in their case by a journalist called Robert Macklin. Our sub-title, though, is ‘an unauthorised political biography’; theirs is ‘the biography’. Is this coincidence, conspiracy, or cock-up? And what is the significance, if any, of the differing sub-titles?

To get an answer to these questions, sit back and relax while I tell the tale of the bringing of our book to market.

When Nick Stuart pitched his idea for this book to us in December 2006, very soon after Kevin Rudd had ascended to the leadership of the parliamentary ALP, it was cast as a conventional political biography, with an emphasis on the nature and source of Rudd’s political ideas. When we discussed his proposal and how he’d go about writing the book, one of the first questions I asked Nick was whether he’d have access to Rudd (as getting information and quotes from Rudd was obviously going to be a pre-requisite for a book of this kind).

No worries, Nick told me. He knew Rudd, was on good terms with him, and was sure he’d able to interview him for the book. With this out of the way, we talked about the very tight schedule the book would involve. The key publishing decision was picking a publication date; and this, in turn, was based on picking the earliest date on which we thought the election might be held.

We estimated that the prime minister would probably not go to the people before October (because of the time he’d need to try to wear the new leader down, and because he wouldn’t want to be accused of going too early). If we were right, and given our sense that we needed to have our book in the shops at least three months before the election for it to have maximum impact, we had to publish at the beginning of July.

In order to meet this date, though, we had to have finished copies in our distributor’s warehouse by late May. And in order to do that, we would have to send the files to our printers in early May. I calculated that, before then, we would need about a month to edit, typeset, and proof the manuscript (by way of comparison, most books would take several months for this process). So Nick had to deliver his manuscript in early April — in four months’ time, from a standing start, with no research or writing yet started. It was a very big ask, for him and us. But we both committed to it, with our eyes open.

Then a series of unexpected events happened. In the new year, I undertook a review of our sales and distribution arrangements, and eventually decided to move them from Pan Macmillan to Penguin. I decided that the change should take place at the beginning of July 2007, as it would be the beginning of our new financial year, would give added impetus to the launch of our July–December list, and would be the least-disruptive time for what is intrinsically a difficult procedure.

Before we’d decided, though, we read that the publishing arm of Penguin had also contracted a biography of Rudd, and that it, too, was going to be published in July (presumably, they’d gone through the same thought-processes that we had). This led to an interesting conversation, when I felt obliged to tell Penguin that one of the first of our books that their sales representatives would have to sell-in to the book trade would be competing directly with one of their own titles. To their great credit, they handled this inconvenient news with aplomb — and, indeed, their sales force went on to do a highly professional job of convincing booksellers of the respective merits of both books.

Nick got to work, we briefed a cover designer (an important part of which was our projected sub-title: ‘a political biography’), and we felt even more committed to the tough schedule we’d set. Now that there was competition, we certainly couldn’t afford to be late.

Then, a month or so later, I started to intuit that the fabled ‘access’ to the subject of our book was becoming tenuous. I don’t know what it was: some murmurings of Nick’s, and a realisation that I wasn’t getting any reports of interviews with Rudd. When Nick and I spoke about this, it soon became obvious that Nick was being given the runaround by Rudd and his staff, and that it would be wise for us to assume that he would be denied access for the duration.

At this point, I made a small instantaneous decision that in hindsight turned out to be crucial: we would call our book ‘an unauthorised political biography’. If Rudd was going to refuse to talk to Nick, and would instead be talking to the author of Penguin’s book, we had to make a virtue of necessity. We had to prevent any perception taking hold that our book might be inadequate by comparison because it lacked first-person quotes from Rudd, and we had to take the initiative by making it clear that our book was spin-free, neither endorsed nor supported by Rudd.

Nick had to change his plans considerably, and inevitably had to take longer than we’d allowed for the manuscript to be written. In the end, we received it in late April, and we had just 13 days to edit, design, and typeset it, have it corrected by Nick, and proof-read by us. Somehow, working night and day, we managed to do it, and the book reached the warehouse in time.

(Later, as if to vindicate our sub-title change, when both books were launched in late June, Rudd attended the Macklin launch, and signed copies of it alongside the author; and several early reviews of the two books pointed out that, having been denied access, Nick had been forced to dig deeper and to talk to a wider array of sources.)

The marketplace will decide which of the two books is better or more interesting, and both sets of authors and publishing houses are, of course, waiting for this verdict with bated breath. It is an unusual situation, unparalleled in its details, and I tell the tale of it here to demonstrate just how uncertain and weird current-affairs publishing can be.

There is another important point to make. I still don’t know why Kevin Rudd refused to talk to Nick. He claims that it was because he was too busy, but this is implausible — to put it mildly. I suspect it was because of his now-well-known desire to exercise control over his media image and the messages that come out of Rudd Central. If this is the reason, it is understandable but mistaken. Hagiographies are not appropriate for prime ministerial contenders, and playing favourites always causes collateral damage.

The result has been that a well-disposed author and a politically sympathetic publishing house has, in effect, provided ammunition to those who are wary of or hostile to Rudd’s leadership. Already The Australian has used snippets from our book as part of its anti-Rudd campaign.

A few years ago, the then reviews editor for The Australian, the late James Hall, looked at my list of forthcoming titles and asked me, in his quiet, sardonic way, ‘Still trying to overthrow the Howard government, Henry?’

I was then, and still am. No political event could give me greater pleasure. I just wish that Kevin Rudd realised who his friends are, and didn’t allow his mania for control to play into the hands of his enemies.

Henry Rosenbloom

Sales, Returns, Reprints, and Bookscan: go figure

2007-04-09T10:43:30Z

If you’re a regular visitor to our website, you’ve probably noticed a recently introduced new feature on our home page, headed ‘Recent Bestsellers’. When you click on this tab, you’re presented with a list of our previous month’s top-12 bestselling titles, listed in order of their sales.

If you’re a thoughtful or inquisitive visitor, you may have wondered what the word ‘bestseller’ means in this context. The answer, it turns out, is that ‘it depends’.

I hasten to say that it doesn’t depend on whimsy or wishful thinking or my subjective judgement. It depends on what you and I understand by the word ‘sales’.

Let me explain. First of all, this is what the list isn’t based on. It doesn’t include any sales we make outside Australia (for instance, in New Zealand), as that would distort the picture we’re aiming to present of our domestic sales rankings. And it doesn’t include direct sales we’ve made to organisations, authors, or individuals, as that would distort the figures for sales that have occurred in the book trade (which are known as ‘trade sales’).

More importantly — and perhaps surprisingly for many readers — the list isn’t based on the number of copies of our books that we’ve ‘sold’ to bookshops. That’s because these aren’t ‘sales’ in the sense understood by ordinary people. These are, rather, invoices for books ordered by bookshops in the hope/expectation that they’ll sell them to the punters who wander into their stores. Any books that aren’t sold are eventually returned (bookshops have to keep them for three months, and usually have up to a year after publication to return them), and the shops are then credited for them.

So, for example, a shop that orders six copies of a new title in March may return three copies in July and one copy the following February, and our initial apparent sale of six becomes a real sale of two. The trouble is, we don’t know in March what our real sales will eventually turn out to be.

That is, we didn’t know until Bookscan came into existence. Bookscan is a private company that tracks trade sales for its subscribers. These are real, weekly, through-the-till sales — not pretend sales, not subject-to-return sales, but bye-bye, have-a-good-life sales. We started subscribing to Bookscan on 1 January 2007, so we now know our real sales. And that’s what our ‘bestellers’ list’ is based on: each month’s sales as reported by Bookscan.

End of story, you might think. I wish it were. The trouble is, Bookscan doesn’t have complete coverage of the book trade: it’s very accurate for large groups (such as Big W) and the chains (such as Angus & Roberston), but it misses out completely on airport bookstores through Newslink outlets (a situation which I’ve heard may soon change), and only has about 25 per cent coverage of the independent bookselling sector. Unfortunately, this sector is where independent publishers like us have their heartland, and where we sell a disproportionately high percentage of our books.

Now, the people behind Bookscan are not stupid, so they deal with the gaps by making allowances for them. This means their ‘sales’ figures are guesstimates, but they’re meant to be highly accurate guesstimates. Booksellers rely on them to keep a check on what’s selling around the country (and what’s not), so it’s a great help to them in making decisions about what to order and re-order. This has been a controversial effect, as it’s led to booksellers reducing their initial orders (and risks), and adopting more of a wait-and-see policy with new releases. This lowers the aggregate initial order for a new title, making it harder for publishers to meet their initial budgets, and anxious about meeting them at all.

Publishers, especially the large ones (who get a comprehensive and sophisticated range of data), also rely on Bookscan to see what titles and genres are selling, where they’re selling, and how their competitors are doing. They also rely on Bookscan to judge whether to reprint successful titles, and to help them decide how many to reprint.

This is where we come to the final twist in the ‘sales’ tale. In the short time I’ve been using Bookscan, I’ve found it frankly useless as an aid to decision-making about reprints. At this point, a case-study is necessary to demonstrate the problem.

The example I have in mind concerns Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey, a superb book that we published on 19 February. (This title is no. 2 on our March bestsellers’ list.) We printed a relatively modest quantity of 2500 copies, as I knew it would be a difficult book to sell with a non-resident author (Stephen is a UK resident, and the book was originally published in late 2006 in the US and the UK). There’d also been a book (which I thought was inferior) on the same subject published in Australia in late 2006, and I was worried that there’d be limited media interest left for our title.

As it happened, a number of things clicked, and we decided suddenly to bring the author out for a quick tour, during which he scored a number of high-profile media interviews. The book was also reviewed favourably and prominently, and it started to sell fast.

Or we thought it did. By 6 March, after several days of heavy ordering from the book trade, there was almost no stock left in our distributor’s warehouse, and I knew we had to reprint. I consulted Bookscan, and its most recent report told me that we’d sold a total of 368 copies by the week ending 24 February. (A few days later, it reported cumulative sales up to 3 March of 482 sales.) So the trade had gobbled up 2500 copies really fast, but Bookscan told me that less than 20 per cent of that total had really been sold.

If I had listened to Bookscan, there would have been no reprint then — or, maybe, ever. Instead, I pressed the button for another 2500 copies. By the time the reprint arrived (very quickly — on 16 March), there were over 900 back-orders logged from the trade. And as I write this blog, there are only 120 copies left from the reprint in the warehouse, and we’ll be out of stock again within days.

But get this: while we’ve now invoiced 5000 copies, Bookscan reports cumulative sales of this title of 1714 copies (as of 31 March). If Bookscan is right, we shouldn’t have reprinted at all; or if we felt we had to, we should have reprinted a much smaller quantity. If the bookshops knew what they were doing (and if we were right by responding to and anticipating their heightened demand), we’ve done the right thing by the book and its author.

Of course, Bookscan may turn out to be correct: all of the reprint and some of the initial print-run may end up being returned. But, intuitively, that doesn’t feel likely. Certainly, if it did happen, not only would I weep and moan, but it would highlight once again just how difficult it is in the book world to know when a sale is really a sale.

I’ve talked about this case with Bookscan, and they’re confident their figures are right. I suppose we’ll all know the answer in a few months’ time. But, in the meantime, there’s a new question: what do we do about another reprint?

And as for our bestsellers’ list, you can be confident that it’s right. Sort of.

Memo to Mr Howard: it's personal

2007-03-03T21:32:15Z

Disgusting, disgraceful, despicable — you pick the adjective you want to use about John Howard and his government. Personally, I’d use all three, and then some.

A few weeks ago, Mr Howard was reported as saying he didn’t detect a mood in the electorate to change the government. I’ve got news for him: whether that’s right or not, there’s a mood to get rid of him. Personally.

And for very good reason. This is the mild-mannered gentleman who’s made an artform of lying through his teeth throughout his political career. Look at just the highlights of his litany of deceit: core and ‘non-core’ promises (announced after he’d won an election); the children overboard’ who weren’t (and whose refugee parents have never been apologised to); the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that didn’t exist, and a war we signed up for that we should never have gone near; and the abandonment of David Hicks to the tender mercies of the US army, only to have the damp squib of a single, pathetic, retrospective charge being proffered against Hicks after he’s endured five years of hell [for my view on the Hicks’ case, see my previous blog].

There’s also the small matter of global warming that Howard never believed in, but is suddenly keen to be seen to be doing something about, now that everybody else is worried about it. Typically, his solution is the catastrophic one of nuclear energy — a nice political squeeze on the opposition, but a disaster for us all if we ever went down that path.

This is the politician and, latterly, the prime minister, who’s been wrong on every major problem he’s had to decide about. He was wrong on Vietnam (and still is); he was obdurately opposed to putting pressure on the apartheid policies of the South African government; he opposed Asian immigration to Australia; he refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol; and, infamously, he committed Australia to the war in Iraq for bogus reasons. Even his supposed support for the independence of East Timor was not what he intended at all.

This is the prime minister for whom no policy backflip is too strenuous if it serves his partisan political purposes. This is the prime minister who’s waged a relentless, Nixonian war on his perceived enemies and opponents in the media, the ABC, the universities, and community organisations. This is the prime minister who, for his own hidebound reasons and in his typical deceptive way, has made every working Australian anxious about their — and their children’s — wages and conditions, This is the prime minister who forgets no slight and tolerates no dissent within his own party.

How ironic that this quintessential social conservative should so betray classic conservative values. The party that once stood for the liberty of the individual, the rule of law, due process, federalism, and the importance of continuity has now been laid waste by Howard and his cronies. Howard now presides over a political fiefdom that rewards servility and punishes opposition. He and his News Limited cheer squad stigmatise and sneer at all those who disagree with him — no matter how principled they are — and no matter how much his stance trashes traditional Liberal values. No instance better exemplifies this hubris than his — and his ministers’ — appalling handling of the David Hicks case.

And lately there’s been the small matter of the Kevin Rudd problem. For the first time in his prime ministership, Howard faces a leader of the opposition who’s energetic, disciplined, calm, decent, and smarter than him. Rudd also happens to be conservative, Christian, and ambitious — which is a difficult trio of core attributes to smear.

The immediate result has been a significant lift in Labor’s poll results and prospects, and in Rudd’s personal standing. I think what this is telling us is that the electorate has been waiting for an ALP leader they can trust and believe in, so they can finally do what they’ve wanted to do for years — get rid of Howard. The odd thing about this politically is that it’s purely personal: a significant majority of the community can’t stand Howard. I suspect they would support a Liberal Party with a more centrist, honest leader.

Howard’s response to this serious threat has been classic: he’s been rattled by the competition, and then had to resort to focus-group polling to aver that Rudd is ‘a bit full of himself’. Then, when news broke of Rudd’s meetings with the disgraced ex-con and former premier of Western Australia, Brian Burke, he set loose his bovver-boy and heir-apparent, Peter Costello. The treasurer, who loves a stoush, has gone in boots-and-all. ‘Anyone who deals with Mr Brian Burke is morally and politically compromised’, Costello thundered in parliament on Thursday. Two days later, Costello’s over-the-top vaudeville act had caused collateral damage to his own side: the erstwhile human services minister, Ian Campbell, had to resign after admitting that he’d met Burke in his (Campbell’s) office.

Rudd, in the meantime, has admitted an error of judgment, has been straightforward about it, and has stayed calm. This latter quality is like pure gold, and I sense that it is this feature above others that gives electors the confidence to feel that they can trust him to act reasonably on their behalf.

As for Mr Howard, he has besmirched his office, reduced his party to a shell of its former self, and made ordinary Australians feel bad about their own country. To put it mildly, he has overstayed his welcome.

As Oliver Cromwell said to the rump parliament in April 1653, ‘You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!’

Henry Rosenbloom

My Australian of the Year: David Hicks

2007-01-27T17:20:58Z

Tim Flannery has just been named Australian of the Year by the official body established to perform this task — and an excellent choice it was. Dr Flannery has done an invaluable job in alerting people around the world to the threat of global warming; and his book on the subject, The Weather Makers, has been a deservedly huge success for Michael Heyward at Text and the publishers around the world to whom he sold the rights.

But, for my money, David Hicks is our alternative Australian of the Year. Hicks has put up with five years of torture and persecution at Guantanamo Bay, courtesy of his own government’s indifference and its craven subservience to its US master. Imprisoned for years without a charge, oppressed without a qualm, he has been a living symbol of post-9/11 realpolitik. With almost no help from outside, and against the massive power of the US state, he has endured. So far.

It originally took two-and-a-half years for Hicks to be charged, after he’d been caught in Afghanistan in December 2001. His alleged crimes: conspiracy, attempted murder, and aiding the enemy. The US claimed that he’d trained in al-Qaeda camps, guarded a Taliban tank at Kandahar airport, and travelled to Konduz in northern Afghanistan to join Taliban forces engaged in combat against US-led forces. They said he intended to kill coalition combatants in Afghanistan between September and December 2001, and that he aided al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the context of an armed conflict with the United States. Other reports have indicated that Hicks is anti-Semitic — which, to me, as the son of Holocaust survivors, is particularly offensive.

But if Hicks did indeed think or do any or all of these things, I’d say he was a dickhead or a ratbag at best, and a vicious little bastard at worst. But what are we really talking about? Anybody who signed up to support the Taliban is a lunatic, but so what? There’s a lot of nasty intent asserted here, but no violent action. And it should be noted that none of this alleged behaviour was illegal in Australia at the time. Yet even these relatively modest charges (for someone who was deemed to be amongst ‘the worst of the worst’ held at Guantanamo) had, of course, to be abandoned under the since-discredited military commission process. And any replacement charges that Hicks faces will still rely on evidence that was gathered under torture, and will be laid under a modified process that has few of the safeguards that Australians associate with ‘a fair go’. And then the new process will presumably be subject to constitutional challenge as well.

And so it has gone on, year after year. Throughout his living hell — the solitary confinement, the interrogations, the long imprisonment, the denial of hope and contact with the outside world — Hicks’ own government has behaved with unspeakable indecency. For most of the time, they’ve ignored him. Some of the time, they’ve defamed him. And lately, as a public campaign to have him either treated decently or repatriated has got under way, the government has tried to act as though it cares.

The prime minister, John Howard, has pretended that he’s given the Americans a deadline to charge Hicks (without explaining what the ‘or else’ implied in his ‘threat’ might be, and only after the Yanks told him they’d beat the date). Alexander Downer, the most undeservedly self-satisfied foreign minister in Australia’s history, recently went out of his way to claim that Hicks’ mental state was fine (and then had the gall to be irritated because people were appalled to hear that his unacknowledged source was a US consular official who’d spent a few minutes in Hicks’ company without talking to him).

The fact is that Hicks’ treatment is unconscionable by any standards — whether you’re a conservative who believes in due process and the rule of law, or a liberal who believes that torture is unacceptable in any situation. Hicks may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but nothing that he is alleged to have done or thought or said could justify what has been done to him.

Enough is enough. The long delays, the psychological and physical torture, and the tainted process have all added up to an intolerable situation that can only be remedied by Hicks being sent home.

Ironically, Hicks looks better as the Australian government’s treatment of him looks worse; that’s what happens when you abandon principle and decency for a higher political cause. The result is that powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler (and not the ersatz kind that the Australian government pretends to represent). If Howard wants a martyr to a lost US–Australia cause, he’s going about it the right way. In the meantime, we should all drink to the alternative Australian of the Year.

Henry Rosenbloom

Bah, humbug

2006-12-13T14:19:19Z

I hate Christmas. Let me rephrase that: I love Christmas.

The whole book trade lives and dies by the results of the three months-or-so before Christmas. If publishers and booksellers don’t make money in this period, they don’t make it for the whole year. Whatever doesn’t sell then, never does; and even what apparently sells comes back in returns from booksellers over the next several months.

Just to add to everybody’s anxiety levels over the stakes involved, Christmas as a retail activity seems to be happening later each year. This can make the suspense, difficult to deal with at the best of times, hard to bear. That so much should hang on so little, over such a short period of time, is awful; that such crass concerns should be held hostage to what should be a celebration of family values, human decency, and religious beliefs is absurd.

Nevertheless, publishers’ lists reflect this reality. All large publishers hold back their best titles for the pre-Christmas period — a time when weekly turnover in bookshops far exceeds their sales in any given week of the first six months of the year. This is even after allowing for mini-seasonal peaks such as Mother’s Day, Anzac Day, and Father’s Day.

Bookshops sometimes complain about this behaviour by publishers (arguing that more and better books should be published earlier in the year), but the truth is that it’s rational behaviour by them. Any large publisher who puts out too many big books between January and June is at grave risk of doing both her authors and her publishing company a significant disservice.

Conversely, any publisher who releases a serious book between November and December is likely to regret the decision. The seasonal avalanche of celebrity bios, blockbusters, brand-name authors, summer reads, and sports books crushes everything in its path.

That’s why I feel deeply conflicted about Christmas (it’s not just because I’m a deracinated Jewish atheist, in case you wondered). The way that Christmas forces us to skew our publishing programme always makes me fret. We’re obliged to publish many of our good books at a time when bookshop activity is relatively light, and then we’re forced to subtly change the nature of our list and to get out of the way of the gorillas when activity surges.

Because of this, our sales figures tend to be more evenly distributed than those of our larger peers. We have fewer bestsellers, but a relatively more reliable spread of sales over the year. We published our biggest-selling new title of the year in May — The Longest Decade, by George Megalogenis. Among other notable titles (in terms of awards and/or sales) that we released in the first half of the calendar year have been Asbestos House, by Gideon Haigh (February); Good Health in the 21st Century, by Dr Carole Hungerford (April); and Fear and Politics, by Carmen Lawrence (June).

Our version of a commercial Christmas book is almost laughable by comparison with the big boys’ output: to take this year as an example, we’ve produced a couple of cartoon books: Best Australian Political Cartoons 2006, edited by Russ Radcliffe, and Make Cakes Not War, by Judy Horacek; the paperback edition of Julian Burnside’s Wordwatching, and The Science of Happiness, by Stefan Klein. (I’m happy to add that all four titles are selling well.)

Just to test conventional understanding, we also published Inside the Global Jihad, by Omar Nasiri, in late November — apparently successfully.

The point (or the trouble, depending on your point of view) is that we can’t bring ourselves to trash our own brand. We’ve learned from bitter experience that we’re incapable of publishing books cynically and well, and that if we have to meet the market we must do it on our terms.

So we’re going to keep publishing good books over the whole year — and, if I say so myself, 2007 is looking like the best publishing list we’ve ever had — and we’re going to keep assuming that intelligent readers don’t disappear in November and December.

Astute readers will notice that this stance is a combination of principle and pragmatism. What can I say? It’s the Christmas season, after all.

Henry Rosenbloom

Buckley’s Hope 25th-plus anniversary celebrated

2006-11-20T17:42:28Z

A very unusual publishing-related event took place recently in Melbourne.

To explain its significance, a little history is needed. In 1980, Scribe published three books: Buckley’s Hope, by Craig Robertson (a fictional recreation of an epic encounter between white and black, before and then during the European foundation of Victoria; Come Spring, by Maria Lewitt (the first piece of Holocaust literature to be published in Australia, written as what we dubbed an ‘autobiographical novel’; and The Murders at Hanging Rock by Yvonne Rousseau (a series of individually plausible but mutually contradictory hypotheses about what might have happened within the fictional world of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock).

The first two titles are still in print (which is almost miraculous in publishing terms), and on Sunday, 12 November 2006 the author of the first book finally realised his long-held desire to organise an anniversary celebration of the publication of his book. In truth, it was originally meant to have been a 25th anniversary celebration last year, in December 2005, but it had been slightly delayed.

About sixty people turned up to what turned out to be a significant event, held at the Trades Hall bar in Carlton. The author, Craig Roberston, spoke about the background to the book (see his speech, below); I spoke about my sense of the book’s importance; Barry Hill also spoke about the Buckley story, and read three poems from his work Ghosting William Buckley; Jan Wosititzky performed an extract from his current show, The Go-Between: William Murrangurk Buckley; and Gregory and Julitha, a duo from Victoria’s surf coast, sang their own songs about Buckley, and finished with Jan’s ‘Barraworn’ song from his show.

There was a special feeling in the room, because everyone knew that they were celebrating something intrinsically important. It wasn’t just the William Buckley story, but the undeniable fact that, by writing Buckley’s Hope, Craig single-handedly had rescued Buckley from obscurity.

Indeed, the anniversary afternoon was a snapshot of the way in which his book has stimulated an outpouring of artistic responses in forms as various as poetry, painting, writing, and drama. But the Buckley tale has never ‘taken’ in the wider culture the way it should have, probably because it’s an account of a white man who went native for 32 years. A film option has been taken out, so maybe there’s still hope.

The William Buckley story should be taught to every school child. In the meantime, I have vowed that, at least while I'm running the company, it will never go out of print.

Henry Rosenbloom

Author Craig Robertson celebrates the anniversary of Buckley’s Hope with Henry and Margot Rosenbloom.

Download Craig Robertson's speech as a pdf: Download