Category Archives: Australia

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Treasure Trove: why defunding Trove leaves Australia poorer

by

Mike Jones, University of Melbourne and Deb Verhoeven, Deakin University

All swashbuckling pirates (and movie producers) know that if you want to find the treasure buried beneath the elusive X you first need a map. A charred fragment is no good: fortune only comes to those who hold enough pieces to follow the trail.

The National Library of Australia’s Trove service is that map for anyone wanting to navigate the high seas of information abundance. (You don’t even need to be a pirate.)

But our information plundering days may soon be over. Recently announced “efficiency dividends” mean that aspects of the Trove service will be scratched.

The news that Trove will face cuts has led to an outpouring of support on social media, with several thousand tweets using the #fundTrove hashtag.

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So what exactly will we lose?

Trove pulls together metadata and content from multiple sources into one platform to make finding what you are looking for an efficient and successful experience.

As of February 25 2016, this includes information on over 374,419,217 books, articles, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives, datasets and more, expressing the extraordinarily rich history of Australian culture.

If, as someone interested in museums, I am looking for information on Sir Frederick McCoy, inaugural director of the National Museum of Victoria, a single Trove search reveals not just books and articles.

I’ll find information on archival collections at the State Library of Victoria and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, biographical entries from the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Encyclopedia of Australian Science, digital photographs, transcribed newspaper obituaries and images of documents such as a Geological Survey of Victoria map to which McCoy contributed.

Distributed content is available within seconds. The benefits to researchers, local and family historians, and the Australian community as a whole, is immense, resulting in over 70,000 unique visitors a day.

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Yet, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Monday, staff have been told the federal government’s “efficiency dividend” will have a “grave impact” on the National Library. Aside from inevitable staff cuts,

The library will also cease aggregating content in Trove from museums and universities unless it is fully funded to do so.

This is the information equivalent to leaving money, or treasure, on the table.

Making Australia’s existing investment in information resources freely and efficiently available is not just a self-evident public good in terms of equality of access. The democratisation of information has clear benefits for innovation and the Turnbull government’s “ideas boom”.

Trove is a key piece of information infrastructure for many professionals, and this wealth of material isn’t behind a paywall or subscription service. There’s no requirement that users prove they are “bona fide” researchers (whatever that may mean).

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It’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection; and the sources it draws on include more than the usual suspects. There’s content from small institutions and large, community collections as well as state-funded libraries, museums and archives.

In a sense Trove has been a revolutionary experience for those of us who rely professionally on access to high-quality information. Once our problem was that there was just too little to go on. Now there’s far too much.

Contrary to the myth of the lone researcher who loves spending hours scouring paper archives and libraries to discover “buried” or “lost” knowledge, humanities research isn’t primarily about the hunt for content. It’s about analysing, processing, interpreting, relating and synthesising useful content that has been found.

By dramatically reducing the time spent on the trail of content, Trove users spend less time hunting for the booty and more time working with the spoils.

Trove not only aggregates content, it provides sophisticated search capability to help narrow down thousands of results. It’s a focal point for the diverse community who help organise, correct and improve the information it contains.

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For people and organisations with some coding skills there are also opportunities to harvest and process content via an API (application programming interface) to reveal new ways of looking at our shared heritage.

The Trove platform supports 21st-century innovation and agile practice. As a result, it has become essential and internationally renowned infrastructure for distributed, collaborative and responsive research into Australian society and culture.

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As a past manager of Trove, Tim Sherratt, pointed out on Wednesday,

Trove is not going to be suddenly turned off.

But its relevance relies on constantly growing the knowledge and content it contains.

If the National Library puts Trove to the sword as a result of the government’s swashbuckling cuts, this innovative stash of content may end up dispersed and buried again, taking Australia off the map. That would definitely leave us poorer, an information desert island in an increasingly interconnected world.

The Conversation

Mike Jones, Consultant Research Archivist, University of Melbourne and Deb Verhoeven, Professor and Chair of Media and Communication, Deakin University

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

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Australian copyright reform stuck in an infinite loop

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Kathy Bowrey, UNSW Australia

Copyright matters. It is a body of law that affects what we know, how we experience and understand the world, and what we are allowed to do with the knowledge we gain. But for most of us copyright is more of a snarl. We only know of it as a restriction that complicates how we interact with each other. It is not often experienced as regulation that helps make good new things happen.

Malcolm Turnbull’s “ideas boom”, his innovation and science agenda, is supposed to make innovation happen by spending A$1.1 billion over four years. The policy papers don’t include any mention of copyright. But copyright rules and regulations sit behind all the agendas found in the innovation statement.

So what is happening with the rules that will affect our capacity to “leap, connect, sparkle and guide” others? There is a copyright agenda underway. And in short, under Attorney-General George Brandis, there has been a lot of twitching and jerking.

Brandis did not have a clean slate. When he took his place in the Abbott ministry there was already an extensive and much needed review of copyright underway, established by the former Labor government.

Headed up by UTS Professor Jill McKeough, the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Copyright and the Digital Economy Inquiry undertook an exhaustive process to produce this final report.

Brandis sat on the final report for some time, tabling it in Parliament on February 13, 2014. The day after he gave a speech where he agreed with the problems highlighted in the report:

“The Copyright Act is overly long, unnecessarily complex, often comically outdated and all too often in its administration, pointlessly bureaucratic.”

But rather than engage with the recommendations of the report, he raised the furphy of piracy — an issue specifically excluded from the ALRC terms of reference, reserved for trade discussions conducted without public input — and then in August 2015 the Abbott government established yet another review.

The Productivity Commission inquiry into Australia’s intellectual property system looks beyond copyright. Ostensibly there is a wide-ranging inquiry into IP laws and “incentives for innovation and investment, including freedom to build on existing innovation”.

However successive governments have negotiated away many areas of Australian IP policy in international agreements, beginning with Chapter 17 of the 2005 the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, and more recently the 2015 Trans-Pacific Partnership. These agreements, negotiated without public scrutiny or evidence about impact, limit our capacity to determine the national interest in fashioning the balance of our IP laws.

In terms of copyright, the Productivity Commission inquiry covers much of the same ground as the ALRC: efficiency and balance, adaptability for the future and evidence based reform. In response to the issues paper 115 submissions were received. There will be another round of public submissions when the discussion paper is released in March/April 2016. So many rounds of public consultation going on, but to what end?

Among the raft of government business hidden in the Christmas break an Exposure Draft was released by the Department of the Communication and Arts (DOCA) on December 23, 2015. There is a public invitation for comment until February 12, 2016.

The background paper to the Exposure Draft notes:

“It is appropriate to proceed with the amendments contained in the Bill before the [Productivity] Commission reports as those amendments simplify the operation of the Act and are likely to be consistent with the recommendations (if any) made by the Commission.”

However the draft provisions are far from simple to follow. They completely fail to address basic issues affecting those who legally access material held in public collections. The bill is based on fantasies about how institutions work in practice and ignores the public’s experience of them altogether. Mere oversight or part of the government’s design?

For example, section 113M allows libraries and archives to make “preservation copies” of original material that is of historical or cultural significance to Australia, but they are not allowed to make these copies available to patrons except through a terminal on site. As a researcher I am not allowed to make an electronic copy of the material so I can use it in writing up my research. As is common practice in libraries I would probably be allowed to transcribe a document by hand.

However transcribing by hand is, as a matter by law, no different to a digital reproduction. Why does this law require me to spend public research money to physically attend the institution, perhaps also requiring an airfare and accommodation expenses, so I can take out my quill?

The bill sets out excessively complicated rules that allow institutions to provide material that might or might not be in copyright to researchers. The rules only apply to a limited number of institutions. The ability to comply with them is based on the incorrect assumption that collections are catalogued to the Nth degree where it is easy to determine who the author was, the date of making the work, the date of publication of the work, the date of the author’s death, relevant details of the current estate holder.

These collections have little commercial, educational or cultural value if left dead, buried and forgotten because of lousy copyright laws. Institutional purpose and the value of the collection is generated when the material is utilised, repurposed, and made to bloom again, by users of the collection.

If the “ideas boom” is to move from mediocre slogan to stimulate real “leaps” and progress so that the “brightest” can shine, there is a need for more than a redistribution of public funds to starving public institutions. Copyright law reform needs to be taken seriously as a political concern, not left as a plaything shunted from inquiry to inquiry, while other games are carried on behind the scenes.

The Conversation

Kathy Bowrey, Professor in Intellectual Property Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW, UNSW Australia

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

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Let’s allow parallel book imports, and subsidise Australian publishing

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Jeff Borland, University of Melbourne

It’s hard to imagine that too many economists in Australia will receive Christmas cards from book publishers this year. A long campaign of lobbying, culminating with the recent Harper review into competition policy, has resulted in the Commonwealth government deciding to remove restrictions on the parallel importation of books.

To most economists this is a long-overdue reform that will increase efficiency. A group of ten prominent Australian economists today signed an open letter calling on the federal parliament to follow through on lifting the restrictions.

To Australian book publishers, and some noteworthy authors, it is an act of public vandalism, threatening the future viability of their industry.

As an economist who loves reading books, I’ve always taken a keen interest in the debate over parallel import restrictions. And I’ve always thought that there was a fairly straightforward solution – which I am going to describe and argue for in this article.

Why Australian book publishing needs support

It is easy to make the argument that books by Australian authors make a big contribution to our lives. By having an Australian outlook or content, they don’t just provide entertainment or learning, they do it in a way that has a particular interest and relevance to us.

But just because something is good doesn’t mean it needs government support. An economist starts from the position that if a product is good, plenty of people will buy it, which gives an appropriate return to its supplier. Only if the market is failing to deliver a return to the supplier that reflects the full benefit to society from the product, do economists believe that the government might need to intervene.

In the case of Australian books, I believe that such an argument does exist. Here I give two reasons why the market may not get it right – and why government support may therefore be needed.

First, the knowledge about Australian public affairs that is contained in books, and the expertise that authors develop by writing those books, allows for a more informed and productive public discourse on government policy making. This is not a benefit that anyone pays for when they buy a book – but it is a benefit to Australian society all the same.

In my own area of economics, recent books by Ross Garnaut and John Edwards on the coming decade in the Australian economy, and historical perspectives by Ian McLean and George Megalogenis, have all been important source materials for debate on what policy makers should be doing.

Second, much of our thinking about Australian identity and values is formed through the perspectives and stories that are expressed in books – whether it be novels or history or biography.

There is no single book that does this. Rather, it is the putting together of the whole of what is being written about and by Australians that enables us to do this thinking. This is a collective benefit from having an Australian book industry – and as such will always be undervalued in the market.

Why parallel import restrictions should be removed

Parallel import restrictions provide the original publisher of a book with the exclusive right to bring that book into Australia for commercial purposes. This allows publishers to treat Australia as a separate market from the rest of the world, and increases their market power compared to book buyers in this country.

The result is that (due to the smaller scale of market and our high average income level) publishers charge higher prices for books in Australia than in most other countries. This addition to book prices in Australia is a cost borne by book buyers. Publishers argue it is a necessary cost to ensure there is a strong local publishing industry.

But there is a problem with this argument. The parallel import restrictions mean that we pay more for every book we buy, not just Australian titles. Suppose that 20% of the volume of book sales in Australia is by Australian authors.

This implies that (roughly speaking) for every A$200 extra we pay in prices for books that goes to Australian authors and their publishers, we are also providing A$800 extra to international authors.

In other words, parallel import restrictions are poorly targeted, and hence an expensive way for Australian consumers to support the local publishing industry.

A better policy

If our objective is to give extra funding to Australian authors and their publishers, why not do this via subsidies or direct payments to them? With such a policy it would be possible to provide the same level of support to the Australian book industry as it receives from parallel import restrictions, but without supporting international authors and their publishers.

Of course, subsidies and payments to the book industry already happen through bodies such as the Australian Council. What I am suggesting is that there should be an increase in the extent of this funding of the book industry to compensate for the removal of parallel import restrictions.

It should be possible to work out the current value that the Australian book industry derives from the import restrictions, and when the restrictions are removed, to increase the amount of funding to the industry by that amount.

That would leave the Australian book industry just as well off as before the removal of parallel import restrictions, and Australian book buyers would be better off as a result of lower prices.

Heading in the wrong direction

The Commonwealth government has announced that it will implement the Harper committee recommendation to remove parallel import restrictions for books. Unfortunately, at the same time, it is removing funding to the Australian book industry.

Instead of increasing funding to compensate for the removal of parallel import restrictions, this week another round of cuts (including the abolition of the Book Council of Australia) was announced.

There can be no doubt of the outcome from this policy mix. Removing import restrictions together with decreasing government funding will unambiguously reduce the size of the Australian book industry; and with that we will lose the many associated benefits to Australian society.

The Conversation

Jeff Borland, Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne

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

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Short shelf life: the Book Council of Australia is stuffed back on the rack

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Stuart Glover, The University of Queensland

In the 2006 throwaway romantic comedy Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughey plays a funny, handsome, promising man who, deep into his thirties, just can’t leave home. Eventually, it turns out that he had suffered a calamitous loss many years before when his fiancée died. He was doomed from the outset; after the bad start, his pecker and promise are all gone.

So it is with the Book Council of Australia (BCA), which was long dreamed of – since 2010 in fact – by a kabal of publisher, bookseller, agent, and author organisations, and eventually endorsed by Labor, and then announced by Tony Abbott at last year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.


Caleb Roenigk

But the day after this year’s PM’s Awards, the A$6 million to fund the BCA for its first three years has slipped back into general revenue as part of the MYEFO budget statement. The BCA, rather than launching, has been sent back to hangar.

The Council’s fate was perhaps soured from the start when – against industry wishes – it was funded by A$6 million taken from the budget of the Australia Council.

It was dirty money, and it became dirtier still when it turned out that this was just a precursor to Senator George Brandis’s A$104.7 million attack on the Australia Council budget in May in order to establish a ministerial National Program for Excellence in the Arts.

Eventually, in September, when Brandis, in one of his dying acts as arts minister, empanelled a Book Council Board, under the chairpersonship of Melbourne University Press’s director Louise Adler, further indignity was heaped upon the BCA.

Melbourne literary activist Sam Twyford-Moore engineered an industry campaign against the Council’s provenance, structure, and board appointments. Louise Adler in particular was targeted. Twyford-Moore called out the big guns: John Coetzee and Nick Cave, alongside 350 others, signed a public letter of opposition.

Since then nothing official has been heard about the BCA until the one-line detail in the MYEFO papers today. But few seem to be mourning its passing.

Former President of the Australian Publishers Association Peter Donoghue seemed to sum up industry feeling in a Facebook post today:

The now abolished Book Council of Australia was always a bullshit organisation of dubious “industry policy” Kim Carr provenance, funded with stolen money, and a play pen for your standard book trade enmities – big players versus small; established versus emerging; local versus global; authors versus everybody else, etc – so I for one rejoice in its demise. The pity is the money wasn’t returned to its rightful owner, the Australia Council.

The demise of the BCA leaves government policy in the literary sector uncertain. Arts Minister Mitch Fifield is promising to “consult widely with the literary community about alternative sector-led mechanisms for representation and promotion”, but for now conservative governments are leaving behind them a trail of acts that some interpret as hostile to literature, including:

At the very least the conservatives seem ambivalent about supporting literature’s potential to arm any of their opponents in the renewed culture wars.

The BCA was probably doomed the moment Tony Abbott announced its creation out of Australia Council funds. But whether government-funded or otherwise, the sector, after the demise of the Literature Board in 2014 and the BCA today, still badly needs a body to advocate for literature and to advise government on policy settings.

The Conversation

Stuart Glover, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, The University of Queensland

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

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Shift away from ‘publish or perish’ puts the public back into publication

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Andrew Walker, Australian National University

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.

The Conversation

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

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

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Parallel importation and Australian book publishing: here we go again

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Peter Donoughue, University of Melbourne

You may have seen news, or read commentary on Twitter and Facebook, about the likely repeal of “parallel importation restrictions” and what that means for publishers, writers and readers in Australia. My own view is that we are in for a fight and that the repeal is far from guaranteed – more’s the pity.

For those who don’t know, parallel importation restrictions (PIRs) are part of our Copyright Act and prohibit importing by booksellers for resale where an Australian publisher who has acquired exclusive rights and publishes the title within 30 days of original overseas publication. The bookseller can import an overseas edition from then on, but only if the book is unavailable from the local publisher for longer than 90 days.

The Final Report of the Competition Policy Review led by Professor Ian Harper was released in April this year. Its draft report last year had recommended the abolition of all the remaining PIRs, including those in the Copyright Act applying to books.

The government yesterday announced it had accepted that recommendation, subject to a review by the Productivity Commission (PC) into Australia’s intellectual property regime generally, and particularly any recommendations it may have regarding transitional arrangements.

In a lengthy discussion about parallel importation generally, and what previous reviews have recommended over the years, and after assessing all the submissions on the issue from publishers and others, Harper’s conclusion was this:

On the basis that the PC [Productivity Commission] has already reviewed parallel import restrictions on books […] and concluded that removing such restrictions would be in the public interest, the Australian Government should, within six months of accepting the recommendation, announce that [..] parallel import restrictions on books will be repealed.

An old story

Harper’s reference to the hated PC and particularly its analysis of book prices in Australia compared to the US and the UK once again inflamed the local debate, but it’s a debate that’s by now tiresome in the extreme. The PC looked at industry practices in 2008/9, a long time ago in this internet age.

Harper seems unaware that things have changed rather dramatically in pricing and importation practices since then. In response to a surge in online ordering by consumers from Amazon and The Book Depository given the strong Australian dollar, publishers finally reacted and the high markups on imported titles have been virtually eliminated. (I wrote in detail about this on The Conversation last year.) 

The real question today is: should we be at all bothered about this issue any more? The Australian Booksellers Association thinks not. It’s completely moved on. It considers other competition issues, such as GST on low value imports and high Australian postal rates, far more significant.

Even the Australian Publishers Association submission (APA) considers the PIRs today “low impact”. Their removal would provide “no benefits to consumers”.  


Nathan O’Nions

My view is we definitely should be bothered. The PIRs should finally be abolished, buried and cremated so they don’t rise like zombies in a quite different future. Many individual publishers operating in the Australian market are adamant they play a vital role and need to be retained.

Their basic argument is this: the PIRs construct Australia as a separate rights territory, and this reality is absolutely critical in enabling the purchase of Australian rights to overseas titles and the sale of rights to original locally published titles into export markets.

The PIRs grant exclusivity both ways, and therefore rights trading can be done with full confidence. 

The problem with this argument has always been its profound conceptual confusion. The PIRs don’t make Australia a rights territory at all (referred to as “territorial copyright”). All they do is disallow importation for commercial purposes by booksellers.

Buying around

The territorial rights are granted by contract with an overseas agent or publisher, and it makes sense to buy separate Australian rights because our population size is big enough to support local printings; our borderless, distant continent inhibits “buying around” by booksellers; and our mature book trade infrastructure (distributors, retailers, freight systems, publicity channels, etc.) facilitates immediate availability and sales.   

Protection and exclusivity can be guaranteed commercially, in other words. An arcane importation provision shoved into our Copyright Act 100 years ago under pressure from panicky British publishers is not at all necessary, and for decades now, in its anti-consumer bias, has done way more harm than good.

Publishers should have been forced to gain protection by operational excellence, not by a trade protectionist law guaranteeing over-pricing and under-servicing.

The PIRs have always protected the weak and uncompetitive publishers, and hence disadvantaged those who wanted to play the game fairly and professionally and with a sure customer focus.

But surely, publishers argue, without the PIRs booksellers will be free to import cheaper overseas editions, or even remainders, thus severely undercutting local rights holders. How can that not do enormous damage to local publishing and authors and eventually readers? 


Pimthida

Publishers can quite easily make buying around an unprofitable thing for a bookseller to indulge in. They need to watch their pricing far more actively than they’ve been in the habit of doing. Maintaining a high Australian RRP when a standard US edition is significantly cheaper is no longer viable.

Individual consumers are already able to buy direct via Amazon, and retailers should also be able to exploit opportunities to compete if the local supplier remains unresponsive to overseas prices and exchange rate fluctuations. Retailers have to do everything they can to attract that consumer into their stores.

But they also have to pay freight, absorb currency losses and can’t return overstocks, so importation is never going to be the usual method of supply unless the local offer is simply not competitive.

Under the current regime the “policing” of local retailers, chastising them and threatening them with possible litigation is no way to build and maintain their loyalty. Australian booksellers universally want to support local publishers and the thriving literary and cultural scene on which their livelihood depends.

Unresponsive pricing and stocking, and miserable trading terms, are the culprits, not the retailers who are simply trying to offer a fair deal to their customers.


Peter Miller

The natural protection available to responsive publishers will more than guarantee that their local edition will dominate the market. There will inevitably be leakage at times, but it will be minimal in impact.   

Publishers need to stop indulging in apocalyptic fantasies of doom and destruction. They are the common argot of industry associations across the board who feel threatened by increased competition, and they do the industry no good at all in terms of public image.

Expressions such as “a radical instrument of cultural engineering” have no empirical basis whatsoever and are simply absurd.

They are also illogical. The APA, for example, proclaims that there will be minimal advantage to consumers from abolishing the PIRs, yet such reform will cause Australian publishing to suffer immense damage. Both can’t be true. 

As for the claim that foreign publishers will likely “take over” the Australian territory absent the PIRs (because, you know, no Australian Territorial Copyright!) by demanding Australia be deemed a non-exclusive territory in rights contracts so the foreign edition can compete, I doubt there’s a more insulting interpretation of how a PIR-absent market would work.

Rather than cower toward ignorant UK or US publishers and their insistence on non-exclusivity, Australian publishers will need to muscle up and clearly explain the facts of the Australian market to their colleagues.

In truth, it would surprise me if we see the abolition of these outmoded, unwarranted and completely unnecessary PIRs any time in the near or even distant future, despite Scott Morrison’s embracing of that idea yesterday.

The political battle is still to come and remember that the author community, egged on by their publishers, will vigorously engage as they have on every previous occasion. Authors are the most articulate and powerful lobby group in the country – beloved public figures with ready access to every media platform.

It’s once again going to be ugly, and that’s a real shame.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Peter Donoughue’s blog Pub Date Critical.

The Conversation

Peter Donoughue, Sessional lecturer in the Master of Communication , University of Melbourne

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

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Book review: The Latham Diaries, ten years on

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Natalie Mast, University of Western Australia

In September 2005, Melbourne University Press (MUP) published former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham’s personal diaries, covering the 11-year period he served in parliament. The book turned Latham, who resigned as leader and from parliament in January that year, into a pariah in the ALP’s eyes.

In the book, Latham does not hold back on his opinions of caucus colleagues, factional leaders, union heavyweights, business elites and journalists. The book caused a sensation. It not only included Latham’s own views, but recounted comments from other Labor caucus members and party figures, many of which were scathing.

Sales-wise, The Latham Diaries was a huge success. MUP ordered a second print run before the book had even been released.

I first read the book in 2005. The book does contain vitriolic insults about political figures of the day. But what struck me then and has remained with me was that The Latham Diaries provided an excellent discussion of the parliamentary Labor Party in the wilderness years post-Paul Keating.

Given that the book was released so soon after Latham quit parliament, I decided a re-reading was warranted in order to determine how well the book had aged and if there were larger lessons that could be taken from it a decade on.

An outsider within caucus

From the time he was a backbencher in the Keating government through to his stint as leader, entries in the book often end with Latham declaring himself the outsider. Latham views himself as a lone operator who often finds only Keating and Gough Whitlam agreeing with his position and encouraging him to keep up “the good fight”.

Within the book Latham is a “true believer”, battling against the ALP’s machine men. But his view of Labor and what it stands for is a romanticised one.

Latham looks back with rose-coloured glasses to mythical glory days, when a purer ALP was committed to improving the lives of working-class Australians. He forgets the splits and factionalism that are just as much a part of ALP history as the campaigns for a minimum wage and universal health care.

Former prime minister Gough Whitlam was a mentor to Mark Latham during his time in Parliament.
AAP/Mick Tsikas

Rejection of the old

Latham despairs at Labor’s rejection of the legacy of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms. He claims that the ALP under Kim Beazley’s leadership was so eager to distance itself from the Hawke-Keating era that no-one – including Beazley – seemed to know what the party stood for.

For Latham, the wilderness years of opposition were unbearable. He is utterly contemptuous of Beazley’s attempts to gain government:

After six years of Beazley’s small-target strategy, we face an identity crisis. The True Believers don’t know what we stand for and the swinging voters have stopped trying to find out.

Latham’s view was that the ALP should gain government because of the appeal of its policies, rather than strategic targeting and poll-driven responses to issues of the day.

Out of step with his party

One of the most interesting things about Latham is that his passion for economic reform – including reduction of tariffs, fiscal accountability, winding up generational reliance on welfare – and his belief in social capital was at the forefront of social democratic thinking in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

While the ALP was busy distancing itself from the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era, many social democrats in Europe and the US were using the reforms as a successful example of “Third Way” thinking. Latham was one of the leading advocates of Third Way politics in Australia during this period and published on the topic.

The Latham Diaries provides an insight into Latham’s views on where the ALP should be heading. While interested in the stories and lessons told by Keating and Whitlam, for Latham the real excitement is always in the future:

That’s the difference between us. I see a problem in the public arena and think: how do I solve it and explain the solution to people? Beazley sees a problem and thinks: how do I analyse it and exploit it?

Latham’s other area of concern focuses on his view that there is a social capital deficit in Australia which not only has a negative impact on political engagement, but also on the way in which we all live our lives. Latham regrets the lack of community that seems to pervade the sprawling Australian suburbs.

ALP factionalism

Throughout the book, it is clear that Latham understands how the factional system of the ALP works:

My belief in adventurism means that I will always have an uneasy relationship with the NSW Right … I joined the Right in the mid-1980s for pragmatic reasons: in a two-faction state you had to join one of them to have any hope of preselection.

The faction, however, is based on a culture of anti-intellectualism. Policy is made through a series of deals rather than the public interest.

Latham’s own behaviour is at times partly driven as a response to the factional system:

Simon Crean’s leadership came under pressure from the factional and union interests opposed to organisational reform … I resolved to remain loyal to his leadership, mainly on principle but also out of self-interest, as this assisted my rehabilitation in caucus after three years on the backbench.

Like many former members of caucus, upon leaving parliament Latham reveals a hatred of the factional system and the rise of machine men controlling the party. His disdain for the “three roosters” – Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy – is evident in many of the entries:

These roosters have not learned anything from the leadership debacle. They are small-minded troublemakers and white-anters who would love to see me fall over to hurt Crean – two for the price of one.

Mark Latham made clear his disdain for the ALP’s factional system, run by the likes of Stephen Conroy.
AAP/Alan Porritt

The relationship between the press and caucus

The contempt Latham has for the press gains momentum throughout the book. In particular, Latham targets:

… the three gallery journalists who have run a ten-year critique on me are Oakes (Jabba), Grattan and Milne (the Dwarf).

Latham despises the culture of leaking among his colleagues. He quotes a June 2003 speech he gave supporting Simon Crean’s leadership:

If the push against our leader were to succeed, it would set a shocking precedent. This long campaign of leaking, backgrounding and sabotage would be legitimised within the ALP.

Following Crean’s departure as opposition leader, Latham assumes the role and tries to deal with the leaking within caucus:

I’ve had my suspicions for some time now that Rudd has been feeding material to Oakes. Decided to set him up, telling Kevvie about our focus groups on Iraq. No such research exists … Today right on cue Jabba has written in The Bulletin.

Post-2004 election fallout

Latham’s angst at the sacrifice of time with his family for his political career is genuine. He and his second wife, Janine, discussed whether or not he should continue in the role:

What can I do now? Three more years in this rotten job, three more years staring across the chamber at a Tory government … It’s tempting to pull the pin.

Having decided to remain as opposition leader, at the end of 2004 Latham suffered a second attack of pancreatitis, which he thinks was most likely a result of radiotherapy treatment he received for his cancer:

It’s all turned to seed: pancreatitis, time away from home, loss of privacy, impact on family, so many ficklers in politics, disdain for the media and the whingeing, gossiping, sickening caucus … that thing they call the Labor Party.

The relief Latham feels at his escape from the rigours of political life is evident.

Lasting lessons

While the book ends with Latham happy at being able to spend time with his family and regain his privacy, the reader is left with one over-arching question: how do we fix this problem?

Latham described an Australia where the country’s main reform party rejected its economic credentials, played small-target politics and refused to engage in the major debate on political philosophy of the late 20th century.

Ten years on, many of the complaints Latham made about the workings of Australia’s parliamentary system have moved from the secret inner sanctum of Canberra to everyday news events:

  • In-depth policy debate appears to be a thing of the past as politicians from both sides simply repeat the slogan of the day at whatever event they happen to be at.

  • Leadership issues quickly come to dominate the news cycle.

  • Leaking dominates the political environment. A mixture of disgruntled MPs seeking retribution and the ambitious looking to make friends in the press gallery provides the daily fodder that now dominates political coverage.

The flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us. Australia remains a poorer nation as a result. Ultimately, The Latham Diaries remains a seminal piece – not only having revealed the ALP’s inner workings, but having highlighted policy issues and structural problems that continue to be of concern a decade on.

The Conversation

Natalie Mast, Associate Director, Research Data & Strategy, University of Western Australia

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

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Life plus 70: who really benefits from copyright’s long life?

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Catherine Bond, UNSW Australia

Few of us wish to disclose our age. But, for the purposes of this article, I am willing to do so: in 2012, I turned 30.

According to data generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a woman in Australia aged 30 in 2012 will likely live for another 54.90 years. If this figure is correct in my case, then copyright will protect this article for nearly 125 years. It will officially enter the public domain on 1 January, 2141.

Is what I say in this article so significant that I, and many generations of Bonds to come, should enjoy a right to control who copies this piece for the course of the next century and beyond?

Probably not. However, that is how copyright applies in Australia. So why do we protect copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years?

Term of his natual life

The length of copyright protection has been in the news recently following the leaking of the Intellectual Property Chapter of the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Under the TPP, Australia won’t be required to make any changes to our term of copyright for works (such as this article). We already introduced the TPP-mandated period of protection for published works – life of the author plus 70 years – when we signed the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004.

Before this, Australia’s term of protection was life of the author plus 50 years, which is the minimum standard required by the Berne Convention, our main international copyright agreement. However, other countries in the TPP, such as Canada and New Zealand, will need to extend copyright in works to life plus 70 years if the TPP proceeds.

For as long as there has been statutory copyright protection, there has been a stated term of protection for published works. That duration is seen as part of what is described as the “copyright balance”.

When the High Court of Australia considered in 2009 whether copyright should protect a TV guide created by Channel Nine in IceTV v Nine Network Australia, the judges stated that:

[…] the purpose of a copyright law respecting original works is to balance the public interest in promoting the encouragement of “literary”, “dramatic”, “musical” and “artistic works”, as defined, by providing a just reward for the creator, with the public interest in maintaining a robust public domain in which further works are produced.

Copyright provides authors with an incentive to create works and release these to the public, by rewarding that author with a number of rights for a limited period of time.

These rights include control over who can copy it or make it available online. In turn, during the term of copyright, the public can use the work as allowed under law, but after copyright expires, any person may copy the work in part or in whole in a variety of ways.

Out of public domain

Over the years, that period of protection has been extended a number of times to take account of factors, including the impact of war, although today copyright protects works for far longer than a patent might protect an invention (20 years) or a design (two terms of five years).

Jane Austen’s books, for example, have been in the public domain for more than 150 years. As a result, anyone can publish and sell their own edition of Emma or Sense and Sensibility, or use Austen’s characters in another story, as happened in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its forthcoming film adaptation.

Innovative works such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are made possible only once copyright lapses.
Robert Burdock/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

When Austen died in 1817, copyright in her works passed to family members, as was intended under copyright law. A posthumous term of copyright was to ensure that heirs of the copyright owner could benefit from what his or her family member created, and to continue to enjoy some financial benefit after the death of the original author.

However, this does not always happen. Austen’s relatives sold the copyright in her works to an English book publisher in the 1830s, and it often happens that a publisher or another third party will own copyright.

When Men at Work were famously sued for copying the children’s song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, the owner of the copyright was not Marian Sinclair, the writer of the song, or her direct heirs. Instead, it was a music publishing company, Larrikin, which purchased copyright in the song from the Public Trustee.

Today, we have empirical evidence that a strong public domain provides significant economic benefits.

Often these benefits are overlooked when we are negotiating trade agreements like the TPP, which may have broader strengths and consequences beyond those that affect IP. However, when the duration of copyright in an online article starts to sound like science fiction, it may be time to limit the time of copyright.

The Conversation

Catherine Bond, Senior Lecturer in Law, UNSW Australia

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

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How to read the Australian book industry in a time of change

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Jan Zwar; David Throsby, and Thomas Longden

In 2014, the Department of Economics at Macquarie University began a three-year study to examine the responses of Australian authors, publishers and readers to global changes in the current publishing environment.

Last week we released the first stage of the study, based on a survey of more than 1,000 Australian book authors. Our findings show that while book authors are innovators in their professional practices, the financial rewards for initiative and experimentation are unevenly distributed.

Authors’ income

The average income of Australian authors is A$12,900. Although a fifth of authors write as their full-time occupation, only 5% earn the average annual income from their creative practice (which we calculate using ABS data as A$61,485 for the 2013-14 financial year). Most authors rely on other paid work and their partner’s income to make ends meet.

Justin Heazlewood’s Funemployed (2014) explores what it’s really like to be a working artist in Australia.

Compounding this is the recent fall in the average selling price of trade books. According to Beth Drumm, Sales and Marketing Manager in the Asia/Pacific division of Phoenix International Publications, the standard price of small-format publications has fallen from A$24.99 – A$29.99 to A$19.99 within the last five years. Highly discounted books sold by discount department stores (such as Kmart, Target and Big W) also impact on an author’s income.

Nearly a fifth of all authors earned over A$101,000 in the period of the survey, and a small proportion of authors (nearly 3%) earned more than A$101,000 from their creative practice alone.

An author’s capacity to earn income from other paid work is boosted by high levels of education. They also possess technical skills (the ability to compose, write and edit) that lead to work that does not produce creative output.

One of the greatest limiting factors for authors is finding time to write. Table 1 (below) shows the proportion of authors for whom insufficient income prevents them from writing further. Domestic responsibilities and the need to earn income from other sources affect more than half of authors.

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Another pressure on trade authors’ time is their increased role in promoting their books. With the rise of social and online media as important channels for promotion, more than half of all trade authors spend more time promoting their work than they did five years ago – and the rise of social media hasn’t negated the importance of in-person bookstore appearances.

Although we examine how changes are affecting all types of authors, in the remainder of this article we focus on the challenges facing literary fiction authors and poets in particular (while we use “literary” fiction, we are aware of the debates around the use of the term).

Literary fiction authors

Changes in the industry are increasing opportunities for authors to publish their work using cost-effective digital technologies and small print runs. Even so, nearly a third of these authors report being worse off financially compared to five years ago.

One factor for this may be the shift of a considerable amount of literary publishing in Australia from larger publishers to small, independent presses – very small presses may have more constraints on the size of advances, if any, they can offer authors, for example.

The top-earning quarter of literary authors earn on average A$9,000 a year from their writing. Literary fiction authors are the most likely to report that insufficient income from their writing prevents them from spending more time on writing (70%). Although the top-earning quarter of literary authors earn on average A$85,000, the majority of their income comes from other types of paid work.

Poets

Australian poet Rachel Smith participated in the Multipoetry project by the Krakow City of Literature. The Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office and Australian Poetry brokered the involvement of Australian poets.

The situation for poets is even more challenging. Nearly three quarters of Australian poets have changed the way they publish, distribute or promote their work. Poets are particularly innovative in finding new avenues for paid work and are also experimenting with self-publishing – but the average income earned from their creative practice by those in Australia’s top-earning quartile of poets is only A$4,900, the lowest average across any of the different types of authors.

After his first self-publishing experiment proved a success, Steven Herrick wrote a series while continuing to publish books with traditional publishers. Not all self-publishing experiences are so positive.

Over half of poets reported no discernible change in their financial position over the past five years. Even though they are innovating and experimenting in their professional practices as well as stylistically (see, for example, the work of self-published performance and multimedia poet Candy Royalle) those changes are not leading to increased incomes.

At the launch of our research findings, Australian poet and author Steven Herrick encouraged poets to write in other genres to increase their incomes.

Herrick self-published a series of cycling memoirs set in Europe through Amazon, starting as an experiment. He quickly established a readership in the UK and he is about to release his fifth title in the series.

The market for literary fiction and poetry in Australia

At the moment, the market size for most Australian-authored literary works is modest. Most literary titles – apart from those by high-profile authors – have print runs of 2,000–4,000 copies.

Print runs for single volumes of poetry for adult readerships are even lower – often between 300 and 1,000 copies. In keeping with a centuries-old tradition, authors are creating their own publishing opportunities such as Kill Your Darlings, a literary journal founded in 2010, taking advantage of digital technology to keep costs down.

Kill Your Darlings was founded by authors Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent.

The actual size of the market for literary works in Australia, particularly for Australian-authored work, is unclear. There are no reliable statistics about the sales of literary books as a proportion of total trade sales, but during 2015 one member of our research team estimated that literary books comprise roughly 5% of trade sales, and less than half of these comprise Australian-authored literary works (onshore trade sales are worth approximately A$900 million).

A related question then arises as to whether it is possible to grow the size of readerships for literary works, and if so, how could that be done? Literary publishers around Australia are endeavouring to increase the size of their readerships but there are no short-cuts.

That’s because the pleasures and rewards of reading literary works are an acquired taste which develops over time. Further, Jim Demetriou, Sales and Marketing Director of Allen and Unwin, commented:

With literature each one of the author’s books is a totally different “animal” to the previous book, so you have to sell the concept and the idea behind each individual title. It’s generally a slower build unless it’s a big-name author who people recognise and understand.

The way forward

Studies of the book industry often refer to the tension between creative and commercial imperatives (see Merchants of Culture,2012, Words & Money, 2010, and Reluctant Capitalists, 2006).

There are no easy answers but the survey findings – and the initial discussion around them – suggest that Australian authors are engaging with changes in the industry and exploring new opportunities.

One feature of the Australian book industry is that authors, publishers and booksellers share a collaborative commitment to its cultural and commercial success. That’s something the new Book Council can bank on, with confidence.

For further information about the research, visit here.

The Conversation

Jan Zwar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow; David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, and Thomas Longden, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

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

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Australia: Queensland – Rejected Premier Suffers More Rejection (From Bookshops)

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