Earlier this year, I visited the library at the Australian National University with my son so he could borrow some books for an essay on Chinese history. Wandering past shelf after shelf, he asked me, “How does it feel to be writing another book that no-one will read?”

It was just another teenage jibe, but in policy terms it was a prescient analysis.

In recent weeks there have been reports that the government is considering making publication output much less important in the formulae that allocate research funding to universities.

Prime Minister Turnbull has signalled a desire to move away from a “publish or perish” culture to a new set of academic incentives that prioritises engagement and impact.

With more than A$1 billion per year in research grants on the table, even a marginal change in allocation methods could see big changes in the dollars flowing to some fields of study.

There is real concern among some academics that the changes will be unfair: scientists will be able to demonstrate impact in the form of patents, commercial spin-offs and industry engagement much more readily than their colleagues in the social sciences or humanities.

When the new Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, talks about the importance of demonstrating “a measurable return on investment,” historians, anthropologists, philosophers and linguists are understandably anxious.

But is a defensive reaction necessary?

Change on the way

Those of us who work in the social sciences and humanities place a great value on the persuasiveness of our words. We can write; not perfectly, but better than most. New and genuinely public forms of publication, rather than the semi-private domain of journals and monographs, provide us with powerful platforms for our academic passions.

We don’t need to be afraid of funding formulae that focus on the quality of societal engagement rather than the quantity of journal articles or monographs.

But it will take a change of attitude and of academic practice.

If we continue to shape our careers around the twice-weekly lecture (to a diminishing class of students) and two journal articles per year (in good quality journals, so our peers can praise them without reading them) our future will be much narrower than it could be.

Academic websites would be a good place for reform to start. Most departmental webpages are online ghost towns, attracting negligible traffic despite the effort and angst put into producing and, intermittently, maintaining them. They do very little to generate broader societal impact via outreach or engagement.

Rather, they exist primarily to reassure academic units of their own existence. They are like sacred totemic objects that symbolise the unity of the academic clan – they are brought out from seclusion in times of social crisis (such as a managerial attempt to rationalise unread online content), briefly venerated, and then forgotten. And one of the ironies of university life is that the managers of websites regularly complain that they struggle to receive content.

Effective engagement and outreach will require a much more nimble academic posture. We need to diversify the way we write. It’s time to stop looking down our nose at public commentary as a second rate form of academic communication. We can rediscover the power of images and sounds.

An ability to operate effectively in the online world should gradually become a baseline academic selection criteria; just as important as the ability to give a lecture or write a chapter.

Rising to the challenge

In no way should this diminish the importance of basic, speculative and even eccentric research. I am an anthropologist and, as my son kindly pointed out, I know what it’s like to write books and articles that don’t exactly fly off the shelves. But I have spent the past decade combining formal promotion-friendly publication with blogging, opinion pieces and media interviews.

The ideas, inspiration and energy flow two ways: from formal research to public outreach and back again. Some of my research has been rather esoteric (spirit beliefs in northern Thailand, anyone?) but I have always enjoyed using insights from that work in public discussions about power, politics and democracy.

Have I been able to demonstrate, or even measure, the impact of my public outreach? To some extent, but certainly not perfectly. Working on this will be challenging and, at times, frustrating.

But engaging in the debate will be more productive than retreating behind a “nobody understands our worth” barricade. There are many qualitative and quantitative tools that we can use to demonstrate our engagement and impact. It will seem like sacrilege to many, but perhaps re-tweets could become an academic metric that sits alongside citation rates?

The challenge laid down by the government is not to abandon pure research or scholarly writing, but to put the public back into publication.

It’s a challenge we should embrace.

Andrew Walker, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Book Gift Rules

5 December 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that offers some rules for giving book gifts.

For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/12/03/10-rules-for-giving-book-gifts/

Moving House With Books

5 December 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that reflects on moving house with boxes of books.

For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/12/04/moving-books-hard/

Seven Stages of Writing a Novel

4 December 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that takes a look at the ‘seven stages of writing a novel.’

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/dec/02/the-seven-stages-of-writing-a-novel-anna-caltabiano

Read it and weep: the book trade needs more than parallel import restrictions

2 December 2015 by particularkev

Jason Ensor, Western Sydney University

The Australian book trade has a long history of tension between books produced at home and books imported from overseas. But our contemporary age may be the first in which parallel importation is undertaken not by booksellers in competition with each other, but by individual consumers in competition with local booksellers.

Known in the trade as PIRs, parallel importation restrictions are a feature of Australia’s Copyright Act and can be summed up as two rules:

1) For a title where no Australian published version exists, any overseas editions may be imported.

2) Once an Australian edition is available for purchase, booksellers are barred from importing overseas copies, unless the title becomes unavailable in Australia for more than three months.

The simple ability to import overseas books into Australia by downloading purchased titles via Amazon’s “fast, free” global cellular network or ordering online via Book Depository has had many effects.

It has not just removed the need to visit physical bookstores; it has also undermined the economic benefits and protection that formerly accrued to Australian publishers, printers and booksellers through the general legal prohibition on the parallel importation of books into Australia by members of the local book trade.

Closing the market

Parallel importation occurs when a product protected by intellectual property rights is imported into Australia after an authorised locally-published version has already been made available for sale in Australia.

As a form of border protection for companies operating in the Australian market, the Australian edition of a book can mean a version of a title which has been solely manufactured in Australia by the owner of the copyright in the work. It can also be an edition by someone who is permitted to manufacture it in Australia under an exclusive licensed arrangement.

It can mean overseas published editions of the work which are allowed into Australia with regards to a contractual arrangement about who is authorised to import, sell and distribute copies locally. Importantly, it can also be about who is not allowed to sell copies.

Restrictions on parallel importation provides protection for the publication of books in Australia by local firms and protection for overseas publishers who wish to maintain a “closed market” in Australia for their editions of titles only.

This prevents local Australian booksellers from sourcing cheaper editions of these same titles from alternative overseas sources. It stops booksellers from obtaining stronger local sales by passing the savings to the reader or from obtaining stronger profits by not passing on the savings.

For booksellers, “closing the market” is seen to restrain competition at the wholesale level by limiting the choice of suppliers for physical books to authorised channels only.

For the consumer, the lack of access to cheaper imports in the local market places little pressure on local retailers to reconsider book prices.

Each major technological advance in copying and distributing text has historically been viewed as a potential threat to the economic equilibrium existing between publishers, printers, distributors and booksellers.

But in the current climate the new technology has also allowed readers to develop new purchasing behaviours with respect to digital and overseas sources of books.

In 2009, the government considered removing copyright restrictions on the parallel importation of books under the view that their continuance increased local book prices. While Australia’s literary communities were responding to the Productivity Commission’s 2009 inquiry into this, readers could already parallel import cheaper books into Australia by way of their internet browser or Kindle.

Australian parallel importation laws certainly protected the local book trade from potentially anti-competitive practices by other bricks-and-mortar businesses. Critically, it did not protect them from the practices of several hundred thousand individual readers.

The combined volume of eBook purchases in Australia in the year following the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry was around 3.4 million sales valued at A$35 million.

At the close of the inquiry in 2009, the government stepped back from altering the nation’s regulatory framework. The protections seemed less and less important to individual consumer’s book buying behaviour. It released a statement that acknowledged the key issues while also distancing itself from the Australian book trade as a future source of support.

A recurring debate

The issue of parallel imports will not go away. It has been a regular point of debate since the first Australian book trade inquiries at the start of the 20th century. Then, as now, the issue was that the price advantage accorded to imported texts worked against the sale of Australian manufactured books, which seemed unreasonably expensive in comparison.

The added pressure today is that the book trade is now competing with its customers.

In 2013, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle Content, David Nagger, acknowledged that the company’s early success in the US digital book market could be credited to a business model that set it apart from all previous e-reader experiments. Unlike other devices which could only display content that had to be manually loaded onto them using a computer, with the Kindle you were always “holding a bookstore in your hand”.

The Kindle bookstore was always available through the company’s own “whispernet” data network, regardless of whether you had access to another internet connection.

Where competitors had failed to gain mainstream consumer interest with various devices, such as the Apple Newton (1993) through to the Sony PRS-505 (2007), Amazon recognised that:

the e-book market would rise or fall with consumers’ ability to get the books they wanted, at an attractive price, and with all the convenience they had come to expect from their increasingly powerful mobile devices.

For David Nagger, Amazon wanted to sell books during those stretches of personal time at home or on the train that were unreachable by the physical book trade. Being able to at any time tap into Amazon’s digital bookstore, which launched with more than 88,000 titles including 100 of the 112 New York Times bestsellers for November 2007, was considered by many commentators of the time to be the Kindle’s single most revolutionary component. You could “think of a book, and have it in less than 60 seconds”.

Strengthen exports

Conveniences like this have transformed the book trade. It will be important therefore not to rehearse past arguments in the current debate. From embargoes to tariffs, in order to create a book culture that is both native and international it would be useful to set aside these kinds of protectionist ideas.

We might instead consider strengthening an export market for Australian books. As British publisher Walter Harrup put it in 1945, in the Sydney Morning Herald:

what Australia needs more than the sale of Australian books in Australia is the sale of Australian books in other parts of the world. What is the good of a country having something to say to the world and yet being unable to communicate those ideas to the world?

It was a comment that implied the many ways in which the business of home and imported books were interconnected. Members of the Australian book trade in the early 20th century certainly seemed prepared to discuss how to restructure book imports and exports to greater local commercial advantage.

The question remains whether that is still the case today.

Would you like to write on the PIR debate? Contact the Arts + Culture editor.

Jason Ensor, Research and Technical Development Manager, Digital Humanities, Western Sydney University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.