Category Archives: Australia

Unknown's avatar

Political tracts: the good, the bad and the badly written

by

Christopher Kremmer, UNSW Australia

If it’s an election, you can bet that our cash-strapped publishing industry is preparing to unleash another volley of those hardy perennials known as the election campaign diaries. Penned by seasoned political observers who tail our leaders on their madcap journey to the ultimate opinion poll, you can expect several of these to be appearing soon in bookshops near you.

Political writing encompasses many different types of books. There are histories of governments, biographies and memoirs of politicians (John Howard’s 2013 Lazarus Rising), scholarly studies of the political process (Ian McAllister’s 2011 The Australian Voter: 50 years of change) and diaries.

This last category may be written by practitioners (The Latham Diaries (2005) and Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014)) or observers, usually journalists, and of these, the election diary has been a growing niche.

For publishers, I suspect, not much thought goes into them. The logic is, “If we don’t publish a campaign book, someone else will. Let’s be proactive. Somebody call Laurie Oakes”.

The popularity of the campaign diary owes much to the prevalence of tragic intrigues and power plays in recent Australian politics. The opinion poll-driven cutting down of leaders by their colleagues, inextricably linked as it is to the election cycle, personalises political discourse, thereby accentuating the gladiatorial, or perhaps Shakespearean aspects of the campaigns that follow.

From the journalist’s point of view, it’s money for nothing. Keeping a diary is just another form of taking notes, very useful when checking your facts down the track. The advance will cover drinks and won’t need to be repaid if the thing doesn’t sell.

For the public, campaign diaries are a godsend for spouses and relatives of impossible-to-buy-for men who are expected to be (but aren’t) interested in that kind of thing. It’s a slightly upmarket version of getting Dad a pair of his favourite socks.

Within the sub-genre of campaign books there are a variety of approaches to telling us what happened, or analysing what it means, or both.

At one end of the spectrum lie books that discern and expand on a theme, like Christine Jackman’s 2008 Inside Kevin 07: The people, the plan, and to a lesser extent Barrie Cassidy’s The Party Thieves: The story of the 2010 election (2011). At the other end, lie documentary-style first person accounts like Mungo MacCallum’s The Mad Marathon: The story of the 2013 election (2013).

The irony of political books generally is that, while publishers are fixated on them, they are usually the first to be remaindered, a sure sign of having over-estimated the market.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his chronic intake of massive doses of dangerous drugs, the American “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson found politics compelling. But as he confessed in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), most political reporting disappointed him.

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists – in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in.

My sense is that we have less to fear on that front in Australia, where competition for stories between news organisations remains vigorous. When it comes to campaign diaries the problem is not timidity, but a lack of ambition when it comes to the writing itself.

Political journalists place great weight on the quality of their information, but are less prone to crafting beautiful sentences. Because their books are produced in a hurry, they fail generally to take full advantage of the techniques of Longform journalism. They also assume there is intense, widespread interest in election campaigns.

This is a courageous assumption that leads to an even more toxic presumption; that the significance of the outcome of an election necessarily makes every detail of the campaign gripping. Not so.

It is 40 years this year since Laurie Oakes published a quickie that is arguably the finest work of book-length narrative non-fiction ever written about Australian politics, Crash through or crash: The unmaking of a Prime Minister (1976).

As anniversaries go, this one is passing quietly, but amid the cacophony of a federal election campaign it’s worth noting. Crash was the third in a trilogy of books Oakes wrote about the rise and fall of Labor leader Gough Whitlam, who died in 2014.

Whitlam’s victory at the 1972 polls ended a 23-year drought for his party, and ushered in an era of unprecedented reform and upheaval in Australian politics which ended with his dismissal by the Governor-General. Oakes, who was already regarded by many as the country’s leading political journalist, published his book the following year. From its opening sentence there is a sense of a writer in full command of the literary form.

The study at Government House is an imposing room. The mushroom colored walls provide a suitably muted background for the Governor-General’s collection of aboriginal bark paintings and for a beaten copper plaque presented to him during an official visit to Papua New Guinea. There are bookshelves on two sides. One wall is dominated by a large window overlooking the spacious grounds and Lake Burley Griffen beyond. The window forms an alcove, furnished with comfortable lounge chairs upholstered in brown fabric, for informal conversation. At the end of the room furthest from the door there is a carved desk where Sir John Kerr conducts formal business.

There had been no shortage of tumultuous moments in Whitlam’s career. Any of them might have made an arresting opening for the book. But Oakes’ chose instead to set the scene by juxtaposing the stillness and quietude of the room against the savage political act that would take place there, when an Australian prime minister was trapped, deceived and disposed of by the unelected representative of our foreign head of state.

It is exactly the right place and moment to begin the book, as the journalist-author uses the authority of his material, and the research and reporting skills that gathered it, to best advantage.

Even Oakes doesn’t write books like this anymore. The reason? We are all in a terrible rush, and in our increasingly fast, complex world, we are taking refuge in commentary and opinion, as opposed to reporting and analysis.

It’s 13 years since another literary landmark. Don Watson’s erudite and majestic Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002) set the bar for quality in political writing so high. But not all the quickies are bad.

Bob Ellis is an acquired taste, which many of us have never acquired, and I came to his book about the 2010 federal election Suddenly, Last Winter: An election diary (2010) with deep foreboding.

The rather lengthy author bio that precedes it informs readers that Lord Bob has written “twenty-one books, fifty-five screenplays, two hundred poems, five-hundred political speeches (including one for Kamahl), a hundred songs and two thousand film reviews”. But, hey, who’s counting? We’re into quality, right?

Okay, so he’s a character, and part of his character is a Promethean capacity for name dropping which does tend to intrude upon the job at hand, that is, writing about the election that pitted Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard against Tony Abbott.

9.40 a.m – A call from Denny Lawrence in New York. The play we co-wrote, Intimate Strangers, has just been given a public reading at the Vaudeville Theatre in London…

11.40 a.m. – A phone call from George Miller (for whom I’m writing spare dialogue in Fury Road) eager to know how Canberra was

4.40 p.m. I begin a journal-letter to John Ralston Saul (the world’s greatest thinker)…

Diaries, by their very nature, include much minutiae, such as when Ellis’s beloved northern beaches retreat is invaded by a bush turkey that knocks over chairs, plates, DVDs and bookshelves, “banging his fool head against closed windows, and with shrill cries beseeching whatever deity he worships to help him”.

But the book survives all its author’s efforts to ruin it, mainly due to a bravura 40-page preface, or as Lord Bob prefers to call it a “curtain-raiser” (written by a Hell-raiser), that hurls the reader into the world it describes.

Bob’s world is one in which politics still matters, and Australia is a country in which politics is still imbued with sectarian passion. However, those who practice politics as opposed to observing it are, shall we say, distracted, a “generation of drongos”, as Ellis describes them, “seizing their preselections and bringing us to ruin.”

A typical drongo leader may be

in make-up for the Today show at six-thirty. He may then be at a business breakfast attempting genial oratory at eight and at a Caucus meeting at nine-thirty for an hour of punitive admonition. His brain arrives at eleven, there’s a press conference at noon, a lunch with the President of Palau at twelve-thirty and Question Time at two…In all this he’s supposed to be running the country and he can’t…And so the roof-batts crisis occurs, and the climate change backflip, and the fight with the mining giants … None of these things he would have done had he been awake. And he hasn’t been awake for two years.

The above description is of Kevin Rudd, who is later characterised as “a cocksure twerp who deserved his downfall richly”. But the debilitating political culture it evokes hasn’t changed, except perhaps in degree.

Like Hunter Thompson, Ellis casts off the fetters that neuter most political reporters. The reader may not share the author’s view that the political rivalry between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott was “erotic”, but the observation is interesting.

Ellis reports, but from a subjective point of view that is at turns, lively, cranky, contentious, silly, surprising, but rarely dull. It’s the kind of writing that lasts, partly because it doesn’t report politics on the campaign’s own terms, but translates it into a conversation that the rest of us can participate in, get irritated by, and at times even enjoy.

When the dust had settled and the minority government was formed, Ellis surveyed the political landscape and found signs of life in the north.

I look forward especially to the ramshackle, whinnying rural-socialist manifestos of Bob Katter. Because I do admire this brilliant wayward white-hatted yodelling dingo-kelpie cross and his untamed, yelping twists of soul.

We get the politics we deserve, but not always writing about it of the quality we expect. Bob’s rude charm saves the campaign diary from itself, and his foibles at some point become endearing.

Always has it been so. Just ask our current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who as a university student once planned to write a political musical based on the life of the Depression era New South Wales Premier Jack Lang.

Bob recalls it well, as he himself (who else?) was involved. He even has a few surviving scraps of some of the songs, one of which features Hitler, as he reveals to Annabel Crabb in this year’s best quickie so far. Crabb’s Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull showcases the journalist’s knack for the well-turned phrase. Take this, for example

Something is missing in Australia. It’s been missing since about 9.30 p.m. on 14 September 2015… It’s the sound of Malcolm Turnbull wanting to be prime minister.

Crabb has a fine ear for the quotable quotes of others too. Recalling his mother Coral’s decision to leave his father (and nine-year-old Malcolm) Turnbull suspects she “sort of got bored with the role.”

Elsewhere in the book, discussing the PM’s diverse pre-politics careers in journalism, law and business, Attorney-General George Brandis remarks that “Malcolm has more hinterland than any previous Australian prime minister”.

And referring to the strains between our current leader and his party, another supporter observes that,

Malcolm doesn’t always realise that in the Liberal Party, when somebody raises an eyebrow at you, it actually means something.

But the chatty spiel that makes Crabb such a successful communicator on television doesn’t always translate well to the page. A blow is “ghastly”, a family farm is “beautiful”, the loss of death of Turnbull’s father (whose affairs were “tangled”) “smashed him up” and the son’s subsequent decision to keep the farm was “crazy brave”. That’s just from page one, and the “adjectivitis” keeps resurfacing throughout the text and becomes very wearing.

Yet the book succeeds mightily, due mainly to the author’s bower-bird instincts, her deep interest in character and astute choice of subject. The reader of her book, and Paddy Manning’s Born to Rule (2015), will find themselves observing those TV images of Malcolm on the campaign trail through the lens of the stories told by these writers.

And they will worry that, win or lose, the current truce between Mr Turnbull and all the people he has offended along the way, including many in his own party, might be short-lived.

The Conversation

Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Australia

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

Unknown's avatar

Reading for moral self-improvement or therapy can occasionally feel a little grim

by

Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

This week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival not only celebrates the art of writing, but the art of reading. Of course, it is difficult not to worry that this might be because the art of reading – that is, deep, critical, transformative reading – has been so radically transformed in the age of big data and Internet skimming that – along with ink and paper – it might be considered to be endangered, too.

Much of the program seems focused on the special kind of paying attention that reading demands – and its pay off in intangible commodities such as curiosity, wonder and awe. It features events that are dedicated not just to the new, but to the enduring influence of the old, in which writers have been asked to talk less about their own work, and more about the works of others that inspired them.

Deborah Adelaide talks about The Women’s Pages (2015), but also about her lifelong fascination with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that inspired it. Frank Moorhouse talks about reading that Victorian marvel George Eliot, and the debt that his own capacious volumes featuring Edith Campbell Berry might owe to it.

Gail Jones talks about the strange excitement of reading Nabokov. Don Watson, in conversation Delia Falconer, discusses the wondrous works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Tegan Bennett Daylight brings the spotlight to bear on the wry, self-deprecating humour of the mid-twentieth century American short-form author JS Perelmen, who may well be new to festival audiences. Jonathan Franzen, in conversation with Daylight, not only talks about Purity (2015), his latest book, but also his vociferous reading life, encompassing the works of obscure and dazzling authors who are seldom read today, including, no doubt, Franzen’s long-standing infatuation with the scathing social satires of the early twentieth-century Austrian writer, Karl Kraus.

There are many different kinds of reading. The festival concentrates on the sort that brings art and life together. Artistic Director Jemma Birrell says, “A good festival, like a good book, should bring real-life benefits.“ Consequently, the program bristles with panels on the Books that Made Me, the Books that Changed Me, and the Books that Saved Me. It features a Literary Healing Room tended by bibliotherapists – that is, book doctors – who administer small doses of book buying as remedy and solace in an alienated world. (You can find these curious doctors at the School of Life in Sydney, Melbourne, and London, where they can be consulted in person or via Skype, at all hours.)

Marcel Proust, with his unsparing insight into human passions and illusions, recognised that there are “pathological circumstances” in which reading can become a sort of “curative discipline”.

But there’s something a little disquieting in the therapeutic cure. I find it odd, for example, that you can also purchase a “philosopher’s jumper” made of trendy black wool from the School of Life’s online shop – a touch overpriced at A$258.94 – in the hope that it will bestow wisdom or insight whenever you wear it. (It’s advertised as modelled on one that belonged to Martin Heidegger, which also seems an odd choice, given Heidegger was a Nazi.)

Also at the festival, philosopher Damon Young talks about the “ethics of reading” and the “virtues” that he claims reading engenders. In an era of clickbate, when articles have transformed into listicles, in which many of us struggle to read a text more than 140 characters long – and more are happy to outsource our critical capacities to a data algorithm known as Google – reading a book certainly demands something that is increasingly harder to find.

According to Young, reading has the capacity to teach us curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice, to gloss the chapters of his recent book, The Art of Reading (2016).

In Young’s model of reading, it is not the book but the reader who bring these virtues into being. He argues – as, indeed, literary scholars have argued for several decades – that it may not be the reader who writes the book, but it is the reader who completes its meaning.

It is the imagination of the reader that brings the book into existence. Without a reader, a book is just a strange pattern of black marks on a page.

It is not that Young confuses art and life. He argues,

Ordinary life has a hazy atmosphere to it, whereas language illuminates brightly and sharply.

Life, in short, is much harder to navigate.

Young’s model of reading for moral self-improvement, like the bibliotherapists’ model of reading for therapy, or the current Sydney festival’s model of reading for life, can occasionally feel a little grim and prescriptive, because they skip over the idea of reading for pleasure or plain fun.

It is often a mistake to go straight for what is said, ignoring how it is said. However tempting it may be to feel that novels contain a world complete, novelistic characters are, as Samuel Beckett unkindly said of Balzac, mere “clockwork cabbages” in comparison to real people.

Books bring solace because they provide meaning when life does not. They do this because they are aesthetically patterned in a way that the real world is not.

Sometimes it is just the happy syntax of a sentence – the way it unwinds and surprises and satisfies. In this, books can also be deceptive. The fact is, how something is said is more often than not the thing that makes the reader feel what they do.

The Conversation

Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia

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

Unknown's avatar

Australia: New Book Laws?

by

The link below is to an article that takes a look at possible new book importation laws in Australia.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/10/flooding-australia-with-imported-books-would-be-an-assault-on-our-literary-culture

Unknown's avatar

It’s time to future-proof Australia’s copyright laws for the 21st century

by

Matthew Rimmer, Queensland University of Technology

The award-winning Australian author Jackie French is wrong. In her open letter, she blasts the Productivity Commission’s report on intellectual property, released last month.

The report, though, makes a number of sensible recommendations that will help modernise Australia’s copyright laws for the 21st century. Economically, the report is rigorous and comprehensive.

Morally, the study shows a subtle and nuanced appreciation that copyright law is designed ultimately to promote the public interest of the Australian community.

The proposed reforms will enhance consumer rights, competition policy, access to knowledge and Australia’s ambitious National Innovation and Science Agenda and “ideas boom”.

The report also makes some helpful suggestions regarding Australia’s process for treaty-making in respect of intellectual property.

Competition policy

The Productivity Commission has recommended the repeal of parallel importation restrictions for books, which supports the position of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison.

Allowing parallel imports will make books cheaper, potentially boosting sales and the number of active readers.
J Brew/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Australia’s parallel importation restrictions are an anachronistic hangover from British imperial publishing networks and are anti-competitive.

Over the past 40 years, the High Court of Australia, the Prices Surveillance Authority, the Australian Parliament, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Productivity Commission and the Harper Competition Policy Review have highlighted how Australian consumers are paying more than they should for books.

Parallel importation restrictions largely benefit multinational publishing networks and foreign authors rather than local authors. As the Productivity Commission comments:

Most of the additional income from higher book prices goes to overseas authors and publishers whose works are released in Australia. The Commission estimated the additional income flowing overseas is around 1.5 times that retained by local copyright holders. In effect, PIRs impose a private, implicit tax on Australian consumers that largely subsidises foreign copyright holders. Indeed, none of the authors with top ten titles in the sample provided by HarperCollins are Australian.

The removal of parallel importation restrictions would be beneficial for Australian readers. Cheaper books for Aussie kids would be a great policy outcome.

In response to the Productivity Commission, publishers and authors have been running a scare campaign against the commission’s recommendations. The multinational publishing empire HarperCollins has grimly defended the restrictions.

Authors Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey, Tara Moss and Jackie French have railed against the report. However, their emotive arguments are weak, inaccurate and unconvincing.

Parallel importation laws are not an effective means of protecting local culture or creative livelihoods. The removal of the restrictions will not destroy the local publishing industry. Indeed, opening up the book market may well be beneficial for publishers and authors by removing age-old distortions in the marketplace.

The Productivity Commission also supported the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into IT Pricing and recommended that Australian consumers should be able to circumvent geoblocking.

Australian consumers deserve a fair deal in the digital economy. It has been concerning that Australian internet users are paying much more for IT works than our counterparts overseas.

Foxtel has opposed these recommendations. However, consumers such as Mark Serrels have complained that Foxtel’s service provides a poor distribution system for TV shows such as Game of Thrones.

Innovation

The Productivity Commission was concerned that “Australia’s copyright system has progressively expanded and protects works longer than necessary to encourage creative endeavour, with consumers bearing the cost”.

The commission also recommended that Australia should adopt a broad defence of “fair use”, supporting the previous inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission Into Copyright Law and the Digital Economy.

The defence of fair use in the United States has enabled innovative start-ups to flourish in hot-spots such as Silicon Valley, Boston and New York. Indeed, the US courts recently recognised that Google Books was protected under the doctrine of fair use.

Professor Peter Jaszi has noted that fair use is the “secret sauce” of US competitiveness.

Australia is at a competitive disadvantage because it has only a much more limited, purpose-specific defence of fair dealing. Start-ups may well be reluctant to base themselves in Australia because of fears of copyright litigation by incumbent industries.

The Productivity Commission recommended:

A new system of user rights, including the introduction of a broad, principles-based fair use exception, is needed to help address this imbalance.

The commission observed:

One of the key advantages of a fair use over a fair dealing exception is that the law can adapt to new circumstances and technologies.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has already highlighted how a defence of fair use could future-proof Australia’s copyright laws.

In addition, the Productivity Commission has recommended that all Australian governments should implement an open access policy for publicly funded research.

The policy should provide free access through an open access repository for all publications funded by governments, directly or through university funding, within 12 months of publication. This proposal will help boost Australia’s Ideas Boom.

The open access sharing of research will support the creative industries, as well as science and technology. Ryan Merkley, CEO of the Creative Commons project, has highlighted the benefits of open access publishing.

In particular, public health research could benefit. As US Vice President Joe Biden recently observed, there is a need to get cancer research out from behind pay-walls.

Fair trade

The Australian government has been involved in a flurry of negotiations over intellectual property and trade, with the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and various trade agreements with Chile, Japan, China and South Korea.

The Productivity Commission noted that the Mickey Mouse copyright term extension under the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement was incredibly expensive for the Australian community. Australia is a net importer of copyright works, and there was a need to mitigate against the costs of exorbitant copyright term extensions.

Reflecting upon such hectic activity, the Productivity Commission has been critical of the government entering into trade agreements without openly and fully assessing the benefits and costs of intellectual property obligations.

The commission warned:

Agreements embodying provisions on the scope and term of IP protection necessarily involve a ‘wrestle for rents’ – Australia should not capitulate too easily.

Moreover, the commission was concerned about the “spaghetti bowl” of trade agreements that Australia had been involved in:

Further, in more recent times, there has been a tendency to favour bilateral and regional initiatives over multilateral ones, resulting in overlapping and complex rules.

The commission’s report will provide a salutary caution for the Australian Parliament as it evaluates the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Rather than let the Productivity Commission’s report be lost in the tumult of the 2016 election, Australian politicians should pay heed to the popular interest in the study.

The Australian public has been crying out for copyright reforms to our anachronistic laws to bring them up to date with the digital age of the 21st century.

There is a great opportunity for political leaders to capitalise upon this public interest in competition, innovation, access to knowledge and fair trade.

The Conversation

Matthew Rimmer, Professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation Law, Queensland University of Technology

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

Unknown's avatar

Australia: Readings – Best Bookshop in the World

by

The link below is to an article that takes a look at Victoria’s ‘Readings’ bookshop, which recently won ‘Bookstore of the Year’ at the London Book Fair.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/02/interview-with-a-bookstore-melbournes-readings-the-best-bookshop-in-the-world

Unknown's avatar

How Australia produces $30 billion worth of ‘grey literature’ that we can’t read

by

Timothy McCallum, University of Southern Queensland

Australia spends more than $30 billion a year on projects which produce “grey literature” – documents which are produced by government departments, academic institutions, private companies and more. But despite all this effort, Australia lacks a standardised mechanism to curate and freely distribute grey literature.

There has never been a better time, than right now, to investigate opportunities into improving our country’s memory.

Government agencies allocate billions of dollars, each year, to research projects and programs. These activities produce research papers, conference papers and other forms of grey literature.

Examples of these agencies include The Australian Research Council and The National Health and Medical Research Council. These two agencies collectively allocated approximately $19 billion dollars in public funding to Australian research projects between 2000 and 2014.

Students in the higher education sector also produce high quality grey literature in the form of Theses and Dissertations.

Of course the public – inclusive of tax payers, business owners, teachers, farmers, researchers, students and more – can all benefit from free and uninterrupted access to all publicly funded knowledge and information.

The importance of grey literature

Given the context, grey literature is a very important source of information in this age of immediacy. It is also perfect for industry research collaboration due to its greater speed and flexibility of dissemination to a wide audience via the internet.

Unfortunately, Australia, unlike its competing international counterparts, has limited provisions for the digital curation or information stewardship of grey literature. At present firms mostly use their company web sites to store information and in turn, the Australian public are heavily reliant on commercial search engines to find information.

The inability to find information quickly impacts innovation and stunts collaboration.

Australia’s Ideas Boom

It is now widely known that Australia’s collaboration between industry and the research and higher education sector is the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries (OECD). In response, the Australian government has launched the national innovation and science agenda, with PM Malcolm Turnbull calling for an “Ideas Boom”.

The Ideas Boom promotes the collaboration between universities and industry in order to create more profitable, sustainable and export focused industries.

While there has been much debate about the flow-on effects from the Ideas Boom, contrary to what some believe, recent research shows that successful industry/research collaboration results in the increased quality and quantity of research output.

Unfortunately knowledge does not transfer through silo-ed organisations and institutions automatically. It also does not flow freely through the boundaries of firms or institutions towards the public.

Australia’s knowledge preservation

This raises concerns about the long-term preservation of Australia’s knowledge, which some think is compounded by the recent decrease in funding to the National Library of Australia which directly effected an online database called Trove which was designed to provide a single point of access to Australia’s openly accessible information.

Of course, Australia does have open access policies. These policies, amongst other things, mandate that publicly funded research be made available through university websites (also known as Institutional Repositories). However, individually searching (or even locating the URL for) each Institutional Repository in-turn is both inefficient and impractical.

Moreover, individually searching each of these systems world-wide would be bordering on impossible. This is part of the reason why information technology infrastructure and products like search engines have boomed (and made billions from advertising) during the last decade.

The gap in sustainable collaboration

A recent Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project revealed that Australia lacks a body that can advise and liaise on best practice for digital information production across government, education, civil society and industry.

The project titled “Grey Literature Strategies” identified a potential national efficiency impact of around $17 billion per annum in relation to grey literature accessibility.

Designing deliberate solutions

Last year the AMP Tomorrow fund provided an opportunity to make inroads into building an access portal into the global wealth of publicly funded information. The project artefact, which is in beta, openaccess.xyz has since harvested as much of the world’s publicly funded research as possible.


openaccess.xyz

The free and ever expanding website, allows users to search millions of grey literature records. At present the interface has two modes: a traditional search engine results page, and a modern data visualisation software product known as Bookworm; the software which inspired the Google Books Ngram Viewer:

screen capture of openaccess dot xyz
openaccess

The artefact is currently in beta and will undergo further development and refinement in the knowledge that solving the problematic transfer of knowledge between industry, governments and academia requires more than meets the eye.

The Australian economy can benefit from the improved curation of, and access to, publicly funded knowledge. Designing and building digital curation infrastructure for grey literature would be of value to Australia.

The unprecedented amount of information which we currently see is, not surprisingly, ever increasing and the time is right to deliberately design a demonstrable system which would ensure the preservation of knowledge and assist in securing Australia’s position as a leading, but more importantly sustainable, industry-research collaborator.

The Conversation

Timothy McCallum, Senior Analyst, University of Southern Queensland

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

Unknown's avatar

Journalism in Australia will not die because Fairfax is walking away from the job

by

Brian McNair, Queensland University of Technology

With depressing regularity I return to this column to talk about cuts to precious journalism capacity in Australia, usually at Fairfax. This week it’s the equivalent of 120 editorial positions consigned to the dustbin of journalistic history, on top of the many hundreds, nay thousands, slashed at Fairfax and other news organisations in Australia in the past three years.

Former Age editor Michael Smith* appeared on ABC News Breakfast this morning to say he thought the:

… future of Fairfax as a news organisation would be decided in the next few weeks.

Would the cuts fall on what he called the “flim-flam” of Fairfax commercial properties such as Next, or where so many have already struck – at the heart of the once-proud news producer’s editorial resource?

We can perhaps guess the answer to that question based on the company’s ruthless race for profit in recent times. Nothing wrong with that, if you’re a shareholder or manager on performance-related bonuses. Too bad if you’re a journalist, or indeed a member of Fairfax’s rapidly dwindling readership.

Readers comments on the SMH coverage of the story make clear the disgust of once-loyal customers of a once-quality product, and the fatalistic realisation that it’s all over for Fairfax as a credible supplier of news in this country.

Rupert Murdoch and News must be enjoying it all hugely. With every cut to their only serious rival in the print and press journalism sector in Australia the dominance of News is enhanced. And deservedly so.

While Fairfax has let what one former senior manager described as “150 years of journalistic talent walk out the door” – and that was quite some time ago, so you can double that figure now – News continues to take its journalism seriously.

You might not agree with every anti-ABC rant you read in The Australian; you might be appalled by some of the tabloid headlines and front pages its popular mastheads deliver – but at least News believes and invests in, well, news, which is far from self-evidently the case for Fairfax’s management.

To some extent – and this is not for a moment to understate the tragedy of jobs lost and careers terminated – Fairfax’s loss has been the gain of Guardian Australia, The Conversation, Crikey and other online outlets that have recruited or benefitted from the input of ex-Fairfax staffers. And we know that the future of journalism has little to do with analogue-era newsrooms and permanent editorial positions.

Journalism in Australia will not die because Fairfax is walking away from the job. It just goes elsewhere, to those places where the digital natives live. It has already done so, if we go by declining print circulations, not just in Australia but all over the advanced capitalist world. Journalists of the old school face huge challenges in adapting to this turbulence.

For all that the digital age will bring opportunities for new kinds of journalist, and new kinds of journalism, there is real tragedy about the continuing defenestration of a once central element of the Australian public sphere. Eric Beecher’s 2013 warning of a looming “civic catastrophe” may have been dramatised for effect, but not by much.

The decline of Fairfax places even greater importance on Australian taxpayers continued support for strong public service journalism.

More than that, they must acquire and stick to the habit of paying for online journalism in the way we used to pay for newspapers. “No pay, no play” might be the takeaway from this week’s sad news.

*This attribution has been corrected. An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed this quote to former Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden.

The Conversation

Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

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

Unknown's avatar

National Library of Australia – Trove

by

The link below is to an article reporting on the threat to Trove, the national archive at The National Library of Australia.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/14/national-librarys-trove-a-great-digital-democracy-under-threat

Unknown's avatar

Friday essay: thriving societies produce great books – can Australia keep up?

by

Nathan Hollier, Monash University

How healthy is the bookselling and publishing industry in Australia? And what are the key reasons for this state of wellbeing (or illness)?

These questions have been pondered by many people over the past decade. But they’re worth asking again, given that Amazon, the “everything store” that began as a bookstore, will soon be warehousing stock here and fulfilling orders from Australia, via a partnership between its subsidiary Book Depository and Australian logistics company DAI Post.

We’re also in the midst of a new round in the highly emotional argument over whether Australia should keep its parallel import restrictions on books.

As debate continues over the impact of digital technology and e-books on the industry, genuinely disinterested voices are hard to find and conclusive data harder still to locate.

Meanwhile, the federal government has decided to no longer count peer-reviewed publications in determining funding for universities. Funding for research will primarily reflect, instead, an academic’s capacity to attract business or other investment in her project.

The decision is expected to disadvantage humanities scholars and their publishers.
It also illuminates our government’s general attitude to its role in the setting of cultural and intellectual policy frameworks – which should be of more than passing interest to publishers, booksellers and readers.


Kim Kyung Hoon

The Amazon factor

Amazon.com (as it was then known) entered the bookselling retail marketplace in the mid-1990s. Since then, Australian booksellers and publishers have been shielded to an extent from the competitive (and some would say anticompetitive) pressures it has imposed on the industry by one key factor: delivery of a book from the US took time and cost money.

Geographic isolation provided some comparative advantage to our book industry, even allowing for Amazon’s premium delivery rates and its sales being free from the GST. In 2011, however, Amazon bought the UK-based company Book Depository.

At the time, Book Depository was its biggest online bookstore competitor. Buying it meant Amazon could take advantage of what now seem arcane international postal union agreements between Australia and the UK, offering zero postage costs for Australian consumers.

Any comparative advantage for Australian booksellers will now go. Amazon setting up here is likely to mean a further drop in retail book prices, (which have been falling for the past five years), as it goes in search of a greater Australian market share.

In one sense, of course, that is good for consumers. And by providing new sales platforms and channels, the firm may also help some Australian retailers and publishers stay in business.

But others may find the new degree of competition pushes them to the wall. Over the last decade, many bookshops have gone under.

And readers who like visiting bookstores may be less impressed by Amazon’s arrival and its owner Jeff Bezos’s commitment to the “everyday low prices” example of Walmart and Costco.

Parallel import restrictions


Jo Yong hak

Parallel import restrictions prohibit retailers here from bringing in overseas versions of a title if an Australian publisher has released a version of it within 30 days of its initial publication and are able to supply the retailer with copies within 90 days of an order being placed.

In April 2015, the Harper Competition Policy Review recommended that the import restrictions be removed. If the federal government does so, what impact will this have?

Some retailers would prefer to have the option of importing a cheaper overseas edition of a book rather than risk losing sales to overseas firms selling books online.

Most publishers here, however – and not only home-grown ones but the Australian offices of multinational corporations – have stridently declared that the removal of the restrictions will seriously damage their business.

The Australian Society of Authors points to recent research revealing that authors are struggling financially to an unprecedented degree.

It positions the debate squarely as one between supporting Australian authors (and the import restrictions) or abandoning them (with the restrictions).

Perhaps the stridency of the general response by the publishers, authors, and to a lesser extent the retailers, is more a reflection of the difficult overall industry conditions than of the likely catastrophic effects of the restrictions’ removal.

The Australian Productivity Commission, which has also examined the restrictions, has almost always tended to the view that the interests of the consumer should take precedence over those of the producer. It reasons that there are more consumers than producers.

Still, it’s interesting to note that while lower prices seem to trump all other concerns in the case of the book industry, when it comes to the Australian banking sector it is apparently essential for us to have a “strong”, or wildly profitable, handful of banks.

E-books are not saving the industry


Heidi Elliott, CC BY

Are ebooks replacing print? Is the book itself (in whatever form) in the last throes of life? What do consumers really want? And should we let them have it?!

With the possible exception of this last question, which may be heretical within our parameters of public debate, all of these questions have been asked in depth in recent years.

Indeed in 2010, a Book Industry Strategy Group, was set up by the then Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr. Later, Greg Combet, in a slightly rejigged ministerial portfolio (Industry Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education), set up the Book Industry Collaborative Council from 2012–13.

Sales of e-books and e-readers, which grew strongly for many years, may have plateaued over the last year or so.

But as there is no body with the capacity or authority to collate e-book sales (in the way that Nielsen BookScan does for print books in Australia) and most information we do have comes from industry participants, authoritative pronouncements on whether e-books are displacing print are not possible.

For most publishers, their profit margin is less on an e-book than it is on a print book – thanks chiefly to Jeff Bezos. In 2007, he wanted to sell e-books for his new Kindle at $9.99. He had the market power to enforce this price as a standard across the global market.

(E-book pricing in the higher education market, it should be noted, is completely different from the retail sector being referred to here.)

In general, e-books are only slightly cheaper to produce than print books. So, with Amazon tightening its percentage screws on publishers for the use of its Kindle channel, most publishers report that print sales remain much more important for them financially then e-book sales.

Print book sales fell in Australia across 2010–14, before bouncing back in 2015, partly with the help of the colouring-books-for-adults phenomenon.


Samuel Wong, CC BY-NC

But what does this mean? That no-one wants to read books anymore? That no-one has time to read books? That book readers are dying off and young people don’t like books? That books can’t compete with other forms of entertainment and instruction? Or only that print books have had a temporary period of … negative growth?

The Australian retail sector as a whole experienced very flat growth across 2010–14, before picking up, as bookstores did, in 2015. Owners of physical bookstores have had to contend with burgeoning online sales.

Meanwhile, Australians are working harder and longer. And government policy decisions seem to be made with increasingly little reference to intellectual, let alone cultural, considerations.

Joel Becker, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, told me in February that there has been a “small but noticeable growth in the presence of bookshops, coming either from existing stores expanding or from new stores opening up”, in the five years since Borders and Angus & Robertson closed.

He notes that sales in the US independent book retail sector were “buoyant … up over eight percent in December 2015 on the previous December, which was also not bad.”

Devaluing the humanities has ripple effects

The federal government making it harder for humanities scholars to demonstrate their value financially within their universities can hardly be viewed as a major index of the health of Australian publishing and bookselling.

The clear message it sends, however, is that the government does not regard cultural matters – questions of historic, literary, philosophic, artistic or social value – as of public significance.

The ancient Greeks saw attending theatrical performances as an important part of their responsibilities as citizens: a way of trying to ensure that political decisions were the result of shared understandings and values.

For our leaders, however, it seems such fundamental questions must be removed from life and made wholly subject to economic considerations.

For the Productivity Commission, tellingly, consumers’ interests are defined almost solely in terms of price. That which cannot be easily measured is simply ignored.


Orangeaurochs, CC BY

There is no evident government interest in encouraging a public conversation about shared or differing values. This is bad for book publishers and sellers because books are a – if not the – major vehicle for such a conversation.

This lack of interest raises a bigger, rarely asked question: just what we want our bookselling and publishing industry to do or achieve for our society?

From the discussions I had with participants in the previous book strategy group and collaborative council, it was relatively clear what people in the industry generally wanted – an efficient, self-reliant (rather than government-reliant) sector, not disadvantaged by regulations that effectively provided assistance to overseas competitors.

In other words, they wanted a fair go and an industry policy framework reflecting that. (In this context, it is worth remembering that Amazon’s sources of profit include the Internet, developed primarily by the US government, tax avoidance, low wages and determined opposition to the unionisation of its workforce.)

But for Australians in general, is our bookselling and publishing industry any more worth preserving than, say, the car industry?

If what “we” want, most fundamentally, from publishers and booksellers, is the opportunity for Australians to write important books for a local readership that can help us build, ultimately, a better overall quality of life and a more robust democracy, perhaps the most important policy decisions pertaining to the industry are not those most immediately affecting it.

Reduced book prices from the arrival of Amazon, for instance, are unlikely to lead to a boom in reading, because there are other more important factors influencing whether people read or not and what and how they read, if they do.

It’s not a coincidence that some of the most enlightened nations in the world, with the highest literacy rates; the best outcomes on a range of social measures – from equality to social cohesion to education and health – and populations who work relatively shorter hours for relatively more money, also have the strongest book publishing and selling businesses.

It’s not a coincidence either, I would suggest, that these northern European nations have produced some of the most successful writers on the world stage in recent decades (Stieg Larrson, Henning Mankell, Karl Knausgaard, Jo Nesbø …)

The best societies create the preconditions for the best minds to shine; instead of the preconditions for the best minds to give up or take up banking.

Thanks to John Byron, Malcolm Neil and Sean Scalmer for reading and commenting on drafts of this article.

The Conversation

Nathan Hollier, Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University

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

Unknown's avatar

Students say textbooks are too expensive – could an open access model be the answer?

by

Roxanne Missingham, Australian National University

For university students, textbooks have been both a saviour and a bane. Having most of the essential readings in a single volume enables students to access resources easily. Despite mostly being used for short periods of time, they come with a hefty price tag – and weight.

With the price of textbooks increasing – in the decade to 2013, the price of textbooks worldwide increased by 82%, roughly triple the price on inflation – they are becoming less accessible to students.

In Australia textbooks cost hundreds of dollars each. For administrative law, a student might spend A$123.95 on a single textbook. A big investment for one course.

The National Union of Students in Australia has launched a campaign to make textbooks cheaper – calling for the removal of import restrictions on books. According to the union, some students are dropping subjects or changing their degrees because textbooks are so expensive.

To add to this, last year the Australian government ceased student scholarships to fund textbooks and other education resources, and instead replaced this funding with a student start-up loan, as a way to make government savings.

Creating an open access textbook

But adopting an open access model in the US is radically shaking up this highly profitable textbook industry.

The textbook industry is worth US$14 billion at year in the US and over A$2 billion in Australia.

The movement is to create open access textbooks, which would mean any student or member of the public, could access the appropriate texts online for free.

Campaigns for affordable textbooks have blossomed starting with strong advocacy in the US, and in October last year, the US Congress announced they would introduce a competitive grant program – called the Affordable College Textbook Act – to support the creation and use of open university textbooks.

This means high quality textbooks will be easily accessible globally to students, professors and the public for free.

How would open access textbooks change education?

So far the open access movement has focused on making publicly-funded research available to the world. In Australia, more than 400,000 open access research papers are available online through Australian universities with around 32 million downloads this year.

Studies in the US have shown that open access textbooks are associated with better student retention, higher marks and greater literacy.

A study by students at Virginia State University School of Business found that students using these textbooks “tended to have higher grades and lower failing and withdrawal rates than those in courses that did not use” the texts.

Results from a study of 5,000 post-secondary students in ten institutions in the US using open educational resources (OER) and over 11,000 control students using commercial textbooks, found that “students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks.

There are some different models for the creation of open access textbooks.

The Gold open access model allows payments to be made to traditional publishers to make texts open access. While this developed in the journal market it is increasingly available for books.

There are now hundreds of open access textbooks – most of those listed in the Open Textbook Library have been published by universities.

It challenges the publishers who have relied on textbooks for their profits – however it is still early days.

But as a case in the US shows, changing the university mindset is not easy. Last year, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University was reprimanded for assigning his students with a less expensive textbook option – as well as open access material – than his department’s US$180 preference.

In Australia, the Australian National University has begun a bold experiment with open access e-textbooks. Three text books have been published so far, with more planned.

The experiences of the first three textbooks (in law, botany and languages) indicate that students are able to use these materials differently with better educational outcomes. This gives students a greater set of capabilities to start their careers with as they are more likely to complete their degrees and achieve better results.

Open access textbooks are able to change quickly to ensure the most up-to-date material is online. Hands on resources that are built on in class experiments that have been researched to produce the best learning are able to be implemented.

Open access textbooks have the potential to have an enormous impact on student learning. It is time for Australia to learn from the initiatives in US and take a major step forward.

The Conversation

Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, Australian National University

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