@Angus:

(quote)
Think of your favourite (living) author. Would you be willing to pay $20:
- for an autographed copy sent to you?
- to meet your favourite author in person?
- to receive an advanced copy of the book, or of all future books?
- to receive s limited edition (say to 500 copies), specially printed, copy of the book?
- etc.
(/quote)

yes, maybe, yes, yes.

If I’m getting that, I’d go for a licensing system, where I could get a license for a ltd ed book, plus a ebook copy (on the basis that you don’t want to handle ltd edition books too much, and a license to read a book doesn’t matter about the media, but the content)

(quote)
Did you know that you can comission First Dog on the Moon to create cartoons just for you? I may very well be a True Fan of FD.
(/quote)

and you can get Dilbert hand signed stuff, and xkcd.

Aside:
Hey Crikey, how about supporting ‘reply to comment’ style, so this becomes easier to read?

No worries. I remember Rupert Murdoch slating them (Amazon) for not investing dot com boom money in things like parking garages because nothing online would ever make money and the bust was inevitable. Oh ye of little faith.

/end threadjack

I saw it for 22 English quid, or double the Australian price, on the internet, or 16 quid second hand.

Penguin Australia distributes for a number of smaller local houses, a practice that is replicated by some other larger international publishers with local arms. All the small houses that rely on them for warehousing and distribution would vanish over night without PIR.

So Guy, I hope you send Jamie Oliver a Chrissy card this year, because without big sellers like him giving Penguin Australia a profitable business, your book simply would not exist on paper. Mark it “To the salmon” with thanks from the “Sprat”, eh?

Booko isn’t comprehensive but it’s a good start, as few dollars here and there make an enormous difference to me. I included postage as others mightn’t get out and about too often either.

“Amazon may have huge turnover, but *it has never made a profit*…”

This urban myth really needs to die.

Of course Guy’s going to tell us ‘no remainder’ contracts etc don’t exist, isn’t he. He ain’t got one. And - equally of course - I’m going to find every reason to call for a change to the oppressive status quo (man) of how books get made. Cuz mine, uh, like, don’t. But both our own axe-grinding aside - everyone’s free to decide what everyone else’s ‘real’ motives in this debate may be - nothing will change the awesome, exhilarating truth, writer dudes all: rejoice, rejoice, we are living through a genuine and very rare moment of cataclysmic epistemological revolution, and the worst - the most poignant - possible thing to be at such times is…well, an incumbent authority in the Old Ways who refuses to let them go. All of them. The lot. Rule a line…and start from scratch, from first principles. It’s all up for grabs, dudes. Oh, the sheer thrill of it. The joyous, liberating thrill.

PIR’s have ten years in ‘em, Guy? Mate, it took Elizabethan England half that to start putting the new mode through its paces. Do. Not. Look. Back. You’ll only turn to stone, me fellow scrivs. You and your prose’ll only turn to dead, heavy, old way stone. Clunk.

Now. I really do promise I’ll shush for a while, MJ! Jack R.

Actually, Dymocks is cheaper here than Angus and Robertson and much cheaper than Borders.

As far as I recall, publishers set prices they will sell at, do they not? So if Dymocks is _forced_ to buy high priced ‘Australian’ (they may just be UK or US imports anyway with new stickers) editions they don’t have much choice. If they have the freedom to say, get stuffed, I’m getting mine from Hong Kong, then why wouldn’t it be cheaper? If they keep all the money then I think we will notice, and laws can be changed back.

The last time PIR were improved in pro consumer fashion the industry prospered - so now it would be bad?

However, there is another factor - would you rather Australian chains with shops on the ground here do better, or more and more money bypass them directly to go to the Book Depository, or fishpond, or Amazon, or fictionwise, or whoever. Because no Australians at all getting any money in this situation except some transporters or credit card companies.

Some people might be happy to pay higher prices, but more and more will say how much can a koala bear and look elsewhere.

…ha,ha!

So now it’s the ‘gubbnit’ who should be doling it out to everyone with a laptop?

If you don’t let a local publishing industry wade through the slush piles, pick out some promising ones, take a commercial risk and give ‘em a go, then how in hell will any “Literature Board” do it? A lottery?

What a pile of confused drivel (and invective).

Rather, more likely that an industry that runs on the smell of an oily rag and the dedication of people who love books can pick better prospects than a government appointed board of apparatchiks.

However, my point is that for Australian publishers who are faced with a relative small market and therefore high marginal costs are not going to drop their prices to an uneconomic level, otherwise they would be pushed out of business by oversees publishers with much lower marginal costs, given the size of their local (even more protected) markets. Is that what we want? Our own industry seriously diminished for the sake of a possibly lower price at Dymocks?

BTW, we already have parallel importing of books. Strangely, Dymocks makes no attempt to reduce prices on those books.

And yes, those few salmon are usually(but not exclusively) from the great ocean of popular writers who sell in the millions worldwide. Without them, there is no local Australian publishing.

Let a few chain stores make a few extra bucks, make little difference to the price of books here, and turn local publishing into a desert.

That’s one choice.

Fortunately we will not turn into Ireland any time soon and have our entire book market run by foreign publishers, who will be less than an interested in putting out our local talent into this little pond.

For now, we’ve made the other choice.

Incidentally don’t encourage Jack. He promised me ages ago he would try to say what he wants in less than 500 words!!

Which will make importing books by individuals even more popular than it was!

In Australia, where the large majority of content bought is foreign, this means we produce extra profits for foreigners at our own expense, which is very dumb on our part. Said media companies signing up for free trade that says you are not allowed to privilege Australian authors over the foreign devils is hardly supportive of the locals, either.

I think you need to pay attention to all of Economics 101.

How is it fallacious when it can introduce competition? e.g. $200 yank textbooks when the uni bookshop could get the same version from India for $70 and sell those instead. Pretty sure that sort of thing would cause a drop in price.

@Perry. Er, the price is set according to what the market will bear except when you introduce compulsory tarrifs to promote societal aims. This:
- can be good - for example, the US Clean Air Acts (and global equivalents) cleaned up the world. As would a global tax on carbon (hey, I can dream); or
- it can be bad and just inflate prices - for example, the first home buyers grant, and the PIL.

Alcan foil, yes, well, that would include me, I expect.

1. I doubt it’s as anywhere near as common as has been claimed to have an o/s remainder that’s still selling significantly at home.

2. Even if one is, the owner of all those $1 copies has to reckon it’s worth shipping them down en masse to try to cannibalise those retail sales likewise. In the internet era, why anyone’s going to do that rather than set up a website and shift them direct to shop-around punters who’ll bear the freight costs themselves escapes me.

3. Even if they make that commercially odd decision they’re hardly out of the woods in the ‘floods of cheap imports’ stakes. Local publishers have the home ground advantage, ntm (presumably) the actual, um, author’s backing in squeezing out the interloper. So, for example, when Toni Jordan’s Addition got a local boost off her MF longlist here - even with thousands of unsold UK editions remaindered/log-jammed overseas - her local imprint released a sexy new version. I’d have backed them to easily fight off - commercially - any UK attempt to dump their surplus into the warmed-up market here. That is, local publishers aren’t commercially passive in this; nor do local sellers particularly want to poo in their local nests, presumably. The local industry’s - even including big bookchain sellers - not some kind of bizarre unpeopled vacuum, run by automatons who want to hurt literature and screw our own writers. Is it? If so, it’s not government’s job to save your industry from itself.

4a. Re: those contracts you so haughtily dismiss: the way books are produced is changing in fundamental ways and that includes the deal side. Authors and agents are going to have to grasp - like everyone else has over the last 30 years - that contractual law and workplace negotiation actually matters on a singular basis, in a climate in which industry-wide protections are goners. ‘Standard contract’ is the oldest hick’s dupe in the book. I just don’t think you are right, by the way, I think there are such things as ‘remainder pulp’ clauses and…oh, look, what do I know, I’ve never even seen a publishing contract, have I. But it’s a contract. It’s a negotiation. Before you sign up, you fight to get what you can down. Write better books, get more negotiating grunt. I doubt Dan Brown has much trouble from cannibalizing remainders. Could be wrong, Guy, me in my tin-foil hat.

4b. But this is not simply about authors and publishers, anyway. Far more important in the ugly and anachronistic matter of remainders are the downstream deals between publisher and through-distributor and outlets, etc. The big end of the industry has been lazy and self-interested - not to mention enviromentally criminal - in the matter of planned-for surplus stock for years. No other industry on the planet would get away with the sustained, built-in wastage of hard copy publishing. Game’s up, tree killers; way past time those who churn out tons of excess dead tree they know no-one will buy; who ship them all over the joint at great carbon footprint; who pulp them after a month at yet more AGW cost, and start all over again…got their industrial poo in one sock and were made to take responsibility for - made to properly factor in the cost of - their unwanted dead tree products. Sorry, but that includes writers. (As for the Oz printing sector, why they aren’t madly tooling up to pwn the coming bespoke PoD era has got me buggered.)

5. Finally, there’s us, the readers/buyers. Remember us? Just because we ‘can’ buy a slightly cheaper US remainder doesn’t mean we ‘will’. Especially if we know what it means for the author’s income, which even if we don’t by now rest assured we’ll be made aware quick smart. Hey - maybe we’ve even taken all the sprayed cultural xenophobia of the last X years to heart, Oz writers; maybe we, um, don’t want to read Cloudstreet in an Yank accent any more than you want to write it in one, either. Maybe we, um, are capable of making purchase choices with half a view to helping out Australian literature all our ownsome, ie without needing big mummy government rules to ensure that not only do we have no choice but to do so; not only are we told how to do so; but we are told to do so in an untransparent and, frankly, culturally railroading way that is also (just by the way) laughably inefficient, wasteful and misdirecting of that extra money we’re clearly willing to shell out. All such that - among much else, true - ambitious publishing players like Lousie Adler and Michael Heyward can run around playing Important Cultural Icon & Big Swinging Publishing D**k rolled into one. Champion.

Australian writers who we agree are in want of and worth subsidising don’t need these charismatic figures strutting around the joint in their name, and they don’t need PIR’s. What they need is $20,000 put quietly each FY year into their bank accounts by the Literature Board with no questions asked. And then they need to be left the f*** alone, to write. This stupid, stupid campaign by a handful of loud-mouthed industry egotists has just waved bye-bye to the PC’s practically begging offer to throw more cash at Australian literature in just such a useful, efficient, targetted way. How many more would-be pens might we have thus funded with a greatlyexpanded direct allocation? 500? 1,000? This decision is a rotten one, most of all for Australian writers. A real own-goal. Check out the ‘careful-what-you-wish-for’ tone of that press release, and weep.

I tried numbering this comment, in an effort to cut myself short. It didn’t really work. I’m very sorry. I will take my tin-foil hat and stop hogging space now. Thanks v. much for it.

Re Universal standard, perhaps we are not quite there but I understood the Sony and Nook both used compatible default standards also cross-compat with iPhone. Need to check further — though too lazy as I have no intention of buying such a device until we see what Apple do and whatever evolves next year (u standard being certain).

http://www.cheaperbooks.com.au/faq-but-why-should-australians-give-up-territorial-copyright-if-the-us-and-the-uk-don%E2%80%99t/