In fact I meant: ‘I’ve got a way to GO, yet.’

As an alternative to Amazon (which I use mostly), fishpond.com.au do have a “match Amazon price” policy. However, they will not (and this is the bit that I dislike) match an order book-by-book-including-frieght. If you place an order and prove that Amazon have better prices, they will give you the credit for the difference. I gave them the option to simply match the price of a multi-book order and they choose not to. This may suit some readers.

For Australian authors, why not consider self-publishing electronic versions. Instead of self-publishing, consider a cooperative of like-minded authors. Set your own rules for distribution, set up a online store with password protected content and you can receive whatever price you set. I imagine an author might get $3 per book in royalties but you could charge $10 if you published yourself. Electronic books are probably the future anyway.

But tell me, how does the fact that a patent has to be sought and demonstrated to be useful and novel whereas copyright is just handed to everyone who pours out pain or words or musical notes without too much plagiarism make the two cases “quite different”.

If I have engaged your attention on this I trust you will propagate the need for copyright reform. (I suspect copyright first benefited relative to patents for inventions because the senior members of families in the Lords and Commons wanted to make sure their younger siblings, children, nephews, nieces and cousins weren’t going to be a burden on them and could pick up a bit from royalties if their avocations, or indeed vocations, included a bit of scribbling or painting or composing.)

Think of an author you know (or artist or composer or musician) and try and think of one whose ego, or introversion, wouldn’t elicit the book, painting, concerto or whatever even if only 25 years of monopoly was guaranteed. Now the idiot Garrett has gone for unalienable pensions for artists great-grandchildren by way of a re-sale rights scheme which can easily be circumvented. But let’s try and win these peripheral battles while waiting on politicians to do something about the hard cases of gambling, junk food and real estate development where big party donors are involved.

Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering
Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems
The Art of Software Security Testing: Identifying Software Security Flaws
Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel
Secure Programming with Static Analysis
Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery
The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities

I am a strong supporter of direct subsidy, preferrably linked to tangible output in some way (NOT sales, but work, output, product, creation). So, it would seem - if the PIR lobby wasn’t too knee-jerk anti-suit to realise it - is the PC. (Talk about a turn-up: writers whining about the possiblity of more public grants!!) Because the benefits of PIR’s are hazy in provenance (especially when it comes to the tiny of number of Australian writers who actually DO benefit), and disguised in the clothing and language of free marketry, they are far more insidious in skewing the Arts&Cult mix in this country than open, direct and accountable subsidy delivered by the peer-assessment/review Arts Council. For all the whining it is easy to do about the AC, in fact, it has a pretty handy record of careful, conscientious, fertile and scrupulously fair delivery of limited taxpayer funds. Plenty of mainstream stuff gets funded, but a pretty good whack of edgy - even doomed-to-remain-fringe - chancers, too. It’s easy to diss the official, direct subsidy and grants system as over-bureacratised, stuffy, ‘safe’ and slow, but - frankly - I will take it, any day, over the self-aggrandizing, unaccountable and culturally-narcissistic sheep in wolf’s clothing of the PIR push, kind of a cultural equivalent of the PPP crew, parading their ‘market’ cred and mechanisms about the Arts&Letters sector like cultural Gordon Geckos, all the while trousering all kinds of hidden and quasi-public subsidy on the sly to make the ‘stand-alone viabilility’ talk hold together. For all the supposed ‘trickle down’ effect on Australian writing of PIR’s, my hunch is that most of the claimed ‘on-flow’ that allegedly goes onwards to writers not directly suckling on the PIR teat - ie those small number with o/s deals and for whom higher local retail prices for their books is a noticeable plus - actually ends up funding the grotesquely-obese, over-hyped ‘Australian publishing industry’ as a ‘show’ of and for itself, with all the latter-day ‘event’ bells, whistles and schlepping that this implies. Take a close look at the woefully-underdone state of the Miles Franklin shortlist year - lousy, lousy editing, almost no evidence at all of any particular great investment.

This, for big marquee names like Winton, Tsiolkas, Nowra, from supposed ‘committed’ Oz indy’s like Allen & Unwin. PIR’s, at heart, aren’t funding good local writing, certainly not good new writing. They’re funding local publisher empire-building, if anything.

My personal opinion is that the PIR debate isn’t about book prices as many of its detractors would have me believe. It’s about not disadvantaging local authors in the face of overseas import restrictions. As a consumer, PIR has zero effect on my ability to buy books at the cheapest possible price.

Now, we can argue about whether or not the current business model for publishing and the way rights are sold and distributed are sustainable, but that’s a different discussion. Also, my understanding is that PIR doesn’t apply to digital books and that their territorial protections are covered by some other restrictions relating to digital copyright.

Still, the Coalition still has much of its economic virtue attached to ideology rather than nuanced analytical intelligence or deep understanding, so, how do you assess the Coalition’s capacity to make sense of this issue?

Brightest Star In The Sky by Marian Keyes
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
New Moon by Mark Cotta Vaz and Mark Cotta Vaz
Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
Breath by Tim Winton
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
An Echo In The Bone by Diana Gabaldon
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Two Australian authors (better than I expected). Zusak and Winton. Both available on Amazon?

What’s funny (in a sad way) is that authors should be fighting to get rid of these laws, but they are instead fighting to keep them. If we Australians buy all our books from Amazon, do the authors think that it’s likely that Australians will buy more, or fewer, Australian books?

It’s the publishers who are enforcing the geographic licence restrictions. But I’m not so worried about that. If the ebook publishers don’t see the light, people will just download pirated copies. The only reason why movie studios are not yet in the same dire straights as music distributors is that broadband (for the larger files required for video) is not yet everywhere. It will be everywhere soon. E-book files, on the other hand, are much smaller even than sound files.

What I would like to see is an Amazon (for physical books) competitor in Australia. This won’t happen under the current parallel importation laws, and (if the laws are not revoked soon), everyone (which I define here as my mum) will learn to buy from Amazon and never go back.

The window is closing.

When it comes to e-books, however, online *retailers* both in Australia and overseas are enforcing geographic restrictions and are refusing to sell e-books to Australian customers unless there is an Australian version of the ebook (even if it’s a book by an overseas author). So, with the newly released Amazon Kindle, Australian customers can legitimately buy ebooks by Stieg Larsson but not by Dan Brown; they can buy Stephenie Meyer but not Jodi Picoult. And thus far, you cannot buy a Kindle ebook of anything by Tim Winton, Peter Carey, Peter Temple, Christos Tsiolkas or most other well-known Australian authors. But as Meski intimates, if you want to trick Amazon into thinking you’re an American, you can buy the same range of Kindle books as our US cousins.