A change to Australia's parallel importation rules reportedly proposed by Competition Minister Craig Emerson would reduce locally published international titles with print runs under 10,000 copies by between a third and a half, according to the Australian Publishers Association (APA).
Responding to Emerson's proposal to reduce the number of days Australian publishers have to make a book available locally (before they lose copyright protection) from 30 to zero, APA CEO Maree McCaskill said that such a suggestion did not acknowledge the work that goes into making books available under the current rules.
‘This issue is not even understood by booksellers and the [Australian Booksellers Association],' McCaskill told WBN. ‘Some of the commentary from Emerson, from [his] conversations with booksellers was the idea that publishers "sit on books",' she said. ‘No, they need the books out there to be sold. It suits them to publish simultaneously, it doesn't suit them to be lagging behind. As it is they sweat blood to [publish] in thirty days.'
McCaskill said that the push for a zero-day rule came from the expectation that, because publishers were able to receive files electronically, publishing could be instant. ‘Listen to stories from the biggest publishers: even with their own sister houses they often can't get the files [straight away] or the overseas publishers won't send them until the book is published in the US. When they have received [the file] they need to do the cover, the layout, because the books have been published for the US and UK markets, so there's a huge amount of work. And the thirty days is all that; plus printed, warehoused and delivered to all shops in Australia--to Broome or Timbuktu.'
For publishers importing books, McCaskill said external factors made simultaneous publication too risky. ‘For those flying stuff in as an unchanged book, its dependant on trucking. What happens if you're working to zero days and there's a truck strike?'
McCaskill said that while the call for zero days might be coming from booksellers, such a change would mean ‘booksellers will be more pressured'. ‘Less of those [international] books will come in and more [customers] will go online to Amazon. ... than they do now.' As for price: ‘If you take that import replacement volume out of the printing market it jeopardises the local printing market because volume coming in from overseas is what keeps the prices down locally. You would in fact put upward pressure on prices.'
Printing industry opposed
The printing industry also opposes the suggested compromise. ‘It's irrelevant to say you're going to maintain restrictions on imports because you need up to thirty days to print the books anyway,' said Hagop Tchamkertenian, national manager for policy and government affairs for the Printing Industries Association of Australia. ‘What [Emerson] is proposing is just impossible, and will see a lot of books no longer printed in Australia but overseas, which is bad for the local industry.'
ABA welcomes proposal
Australian Booksellers Association CEO Malcolm Neil does not buy the APA argument however, and welcomes the proposed compromise. ‘We think the consumer and booksellers deserve a dividend from the technological advances of the past twenty years,' he told WBN.
And while he welcomed the apparent willingness of the government to address bookseller concerns on speed to market, Neil said the ABA was also happy the government appeared to have listened to the industry on the matter of territorial copyright. ‘We applaud the indications that the government appears to have agreed that the retention of territorial copyright was fundamental to the future of our industry,' he said.
Booksellers, what do you think? Send your comments to bookseller.publisher@thorpe.com.au.
