‘It is certainly disappointing that the [Commission] doesn't understand that local tertiary publishing has grown in recent years due to the certainty publishers have had over their import products,' David Barnett, convenor of the Australian Publishers Association's (APA) Tertiary Committee and CEO of Pearson, told WBN.
‘APA statistics show that local tertiary publishing as a percentage of the total [ie. of all local and imported tertiary publishing] has grown from 35% to 45% between 2001 and 2007,' said Barnett. ‘In addition, tertiary publishers have invested $100 million (combination of pre-press and manufacturing costs) in that time in developing local products, increasingly with digital elements,' he added. ‘That's an impressive story.'
Barnett said the abolition of PIRs would remove the market certainty this success was based on and thus reduce investment in local product. ‘That will mean fewer titles and less risk-taking, meaning less local content and less innovation,' he said. ‘And therefore more reliance on overseas (predominantly US) material.'
Barnett's concerns echoed those of McGraw Hill managing director and APA president Murray St Leger, who told WBN that the recommendations, if implemented, would reduce the ‘output of Australian educational content' and would therefore be ‘detrimental to the educational publishing industry, but more importantly, could lead to poorer educational outcomes in all areas'.
No subsidies for educational publishers
Unlike the trade publishing sector, which the Commission has proposed should receive direct government funding in the form of subsidies once PIRs have been removed, the educational publishing sector is not in line for financial support should the Commission's recommendations be enacted and the market certainty it is currently based on be removed.
‘In terms of textbook publishing, educational authors currently receive no subsidies, nor do they receive formal credit for writing textbooks within the university sector's research framework,' said St Leger. ‘Given this, the industry needs a stable market environment to continue to make the large, long-term investment in Australian educational content acquisition and development. This would be the best outcome for authors as well as academics, teachers and students and the industry is united in their rejection of the [Commission's] recommendations.'
‘Why is tertiary publishing any less worthy than trade publishing of receiving subsidies for authors and publishers?' asked Barnett. ‘Of course, those who misunderstand the nature of publishing will probably expect that students can simply download everything they need from the web!'
Campus booksellers reject open market
Fears of a reduction in locally produced educational materials have also been expressed by campus booksellers. Graeme Connelly, president of the Australian Campus Booksellers' Association (ACBA) and manager of the Melbourne University Bookshop, said ‘the likely effect on the supply chain for textbooks' of a removal of PIRs was worrying. ‘The total effect of having so called "cheaper" editions of books sourced from Asia with no quality control on the correctness and relevance of the edition would inevitably lead to instability in timely procurement,' he said.
‘We believe that changes to the current regulations regarding parallel importation of books and other copyrighted material will have a negative impact on the quality of product available to the market, as well a potential decrease in Australian produced content,' agreed University Co-op CEO Jane Caton.
Writing in a post-draft submission to the Productivity Commission, Box Hill Institute of TAFE Bookshop manager David Coman said the removal of PIRs may jeopardise the current relationship between publishers and educational facilities. ‘The current system supports important interaction between campus bookshops, teaching faculties and publisher representatives to determine optimum support resources,' he wrote. ‘How would this be sustained in a market with diminished financial capacities for key players? Will there be deterioration in the quality and selection of important textbook support materials needed by students to succeed in their endeavour?'
However, former educational publisher Peter Donoughue, a proponent of the open market during his time as managing director of John Wiley and Sons, said in his post-draft submission to the Commission that a removal of PIRs would have little effect on educational publishing in Australia.
‘The fact is that educational publishers have never relied on the 30/90 day provisions since their establishment in 1991,' he wrote. ‘They've never needed to. New texts published in the US or the UK are published at an optimal time for the northern hemisphere academic year. They are not flown into Australia in "commercial" quantities for sale within 30 days, as the comparable Australian academic year starts six months later.' Donoughue argued that as these overseas titles are not made available locally within 30 days of publication, booksellers are already free to import them from Asia, but don't.
‘Campus booksellers rely on the fine metrics of supply efficiencies for profitability. They are not going to throw these away for a possible few extra dollars of margin which may look tempting on paper but would be soon eaten up by supply realities,' he wrote.
However, educational publishers opposed to the Commission's recommendations took issue with Donoughue's claim that they did not regularly establish copyright for overseas titles. Without the ability to establish copyright in this way, on publisher told WBN, the industry faced the risk that ‘other distributors'--who had no interest in the long-term health of the industry--would import cheaper editions from Asia. Such an outcome, said the publisher, would threaten investment in local materials and distribution.
For regularly updated links to mainstream news stories and blog posts on the parallel importation issue, see WBN publisher Tim Coronel's Delicious links here.
Any comments on the issue can be sent to bookseller.publisher@thorpe.com.au.
