Dymock's, Australia's biggest bookselling chain, and one of the leading proponents of the failed PI initiative

The big furore for Australian book publishing in 2009 has been over the Productivity Commission’s proposal to scrap parallel importation (PI) laws. This subject has been written and blogged about, argued and picked over to such an extent, that the real guts of the issue, if ever there were any, have been rendered indistinguishable from their surrounding innards. (Overworking that metaphor a little I realise.) I’ve refrained from commenting on the debate until now, as it seemed there was little that could be added. But now, the long awaited outcome has arrived, and the government will not be scrapping our parallel importation laws, and it’s business as usual. (See the earlier MobyLives report.) Business being that if I publish a book here, and that book is later published in another country, then that foreign edition can never be imported back into Australia (online overseas trading notwithstanding).

Apparently the catalyst for reviewing our PI laws was to bring down the price of books. I won’t go into any of the arguments put forward by my fellow constituents as to why the laws should not be changed (for a quick glimpse at that, you could start here), except to say that of the 268 submissions received by the Productivity Commission, some 260 opposed the idea. But I would like to take up the issue of price point. Firstly, are books too expensive? I don’t think so (although I generally get a little pissed off once a novel rises above, say, $32.95 — that’s Australian dollars). In fact, the cheaper something is, the more suspicious I am of quality. But as a publisher, I know what the profit margin is, and publishers are cutting it as fine as they possibly can. I daresay a lot of consumers think that publishers are raking it in. Alas, no. A couple of people in my neighbourhood who consider themselves to be fairly big readers, were under the impression that the author pays us! “But all that work you must do to get their books out there!” It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately that’s not the way it works.

I’d like to put some of the onus on the cost of printing. But I have to assume that printing costs are as cheap as they can be. I’ve certainly spent a lot of hours haggling with my rep to get the prices down. It’s just a grossly inefficient way to publish a book it seems. Freight and warehousing is something else that takes up a fairly big slice of the pie, but as far as I’m aware, no one’s shined a spotlight on that particular point in the supply chain. Booksellers are retailers, so they can charge whatever they think the market can bear. And that’s their prerogative. So it’s not really fair to blame them for the price of books either.

If the price of books is the real matter, then we should be closely examining all of the junctures in the book supply chain, not just the way in which publishers handle copyright (now more than ever with new DRM issues). There are simply too many mouths to feed in the long mess hall of publishing. And as long as the industry retains its traditional framework, then debates such as this will be perennial. Something that excites me most about the future of digital publishing is the way in which, as publishers, we can challenge this longstanding business model.

(NB: this post is not intended to be anti-bookseller by any means. Hello booksellers! But perhaps their role will emerge to be something significantly different from what it currently is?)