I have been busy this week and thus unable to post as much as I would like. I will however leave a short round up of news from the past week.
Australian Publishers
Australia has some of the most strict importation laws in the world, when it comes to books. Currently Australian bookshops are banned from importing overseas editions of a book if an Australian publisher has produced their own edition within 30 days of its foreign publication. Opponents to the law say that this allows publishers to charge significantly more for books in Australia. Proponents of the law, including Australian writers Peter Carey and Tim Winton, claim that it preserves cultural diversity and that without the added income publishers receive from these rights local authors would be up a creek.
Earlier this week the Australian government began to re-evaluate the usefulness of this law, much to the chagrin of Authors and publishers.
The Productivity Commission, which the Australian government had asked to
review the law, recommended that the restrictions should be removed, with the
industry given three years to adjust before the changes take effect. "One of the
Commission's concerns is that consumers pay higher prices for books, regardless
of their cultural significance," said the Commission's deputy chairman, Mike
Woods, announcing the results of the study (it found that last year Australian
books were on average 35% more expensive than US editions). "A second concern is
that these costs to consumers generate greater benefits for overseas authors and
publishers than they do for our local writers. In effect, Australian consumers
are subsidizing foreign book producers,"
Full details in The Guardian
ebooks: when to publish
The current publishing format has been in place for many years. If you want to read a book when it comes out you must buy it in hardcover, and to save a few bucks you can wait for the paperback, with super budget editions of the biggest bestsellers trailing months or even years down the road. But the question that publishers are asking themselves now is, where does the ebook fall into this mix.
The New York Times took a look at the dilemma for Dan Brown's publishers when The Lost Symbol comes out in September.
No topic is more hotly debated in book circles at the moment than the timing,
pricing and ultimate impact of e-books on the financial health of publishers and
retailers. Publishers are grappling with e-book release dates partly because
they are trying to understand how digital editions affect demand for hardcover
books. A hardcover typically sells for anywhere from $25 to $35, while the most
common price for an e-book has quickly become $9.99.
Ebook Pricing
And while publishers fight the concept of the $9.99 ebook, which is at risk of reducing their profit margins, critics at Slate are suggesting that losing the price war might be the best thing to happen to them. Their theory is that should publishers win and increase the price of ebooks cusomers will turn to pirated versions placing literature in the same boat as record lables. They say all that it will take is a better reading device
What has kept illegal e-books from taking off? First, all the electronic reading gadgets on the market are subpar, if you ask me, making the reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and even cereal boxes painful. The resolution is poor. The fonts are crap. The navigation is chunky. Not since the eight-track player has modern technology produced such a heap of garbage. If you're looking for the reason e-books constitute just 1 percent or 2 percent of all book sales, stop the search. Second, the hassle factor is too great. Only a student or a deadbeat with a lot of time on his hands is going to want to search the Web and scour the torrents for, say, a free, bootlegged copy of A.J. Liebling's The Telephone Booth Indian. It's as tedious as fishing! Third, not all bootlegged e-books are created equal. On finally finding that free book you so desire, you may find yourself wishing you had purchased the legal edition: Your bootleg may be filled with typographical errors, thanks to the slipshod application of optical character-recognition software. If a nicely produced Kindle version of The Telephone Booth Indian that doesn't have to be monkeyed around with can be easily nabbed for $9.99, which it can, why bother breaking the law to obtain an inferior edition for display on a rotten device? It's like using an acetylene torch to loot a kid's piggy bank.
