A commission has determined that books are too expensive in Australia because of a trade ban that prevents importing of a lot of books. From ABC news:

The commission says the current restrictions mean Australian consumers are paying up to 35 per cent more for books than readers in other countries.

Following a six-month study on book prices in Australia and around the world, the commission has made three recommendations to the Federal Government today.

But to give publishers and writers time to adjust to the changes, the commission is recommending the Government wait three years before the restrictions are lifted.

This is such totally awesome news. Books in Australia are so f*** off expensive compared to anywhere else - especially the US - that it's embarrassing. I buy more books than I do any other item (with the possible exception of food).

Annoying we have to wait 3 years for it to take place, I say just pull it now and give us our cheap books!

Amazon has been and will always be a friend of mine lol

cool! although i dunno if even cheaper prices would be enough to get me buying books again. i pretty much stopped buying books when i found you could get free ebooks online or from the library. really... what's the point of owning a book that will be a big pile of paper dust in about 10years? i got a bookshelf of books i bought in the 80s & 90s & only the hardcovers are surviving well. the majority of paperbacks are losing thier pages as the spine deteriorates. :/

i heart books. i've read a few ebooks but i prefer an actual book. easier on the eyes and i suppose i enjoy collecting them. most of my older paperbacks don't fall apart but they do tend to become very discolored (yellowy/brown). i'd usually buy a hardcover though if i was planning on keeping it for a long time.

edit: failspelling

last edited by taggs at 10:57:23 15/Jul/09

The Book Depository has free worldwide shipping, if you dont mind waiting a week for your book it has pretty much the cheapest prices around.

Also, booko.com.au will search all the online stores, factor in shipping and give you the cheapest price found for a particular book.

... wtf... it's only 35 cents. yor so cheap

Clearly you didn't read enough. It's 35%, not 35 cents.

The Book Depository has free worldwide shipping, if you dont mind waiting a week for your book it has pretty much the cheapest prices around.

Also, booko.com.au will search all the online stores, factor in shipping and give you the cheapest price found for a particular book.

holy f***ing awesome, thanks dude

This is just a commission finding right? This doesn't mean it is actually going to be put in place by the Government.

Though I agree it is good news, if it comes in to effect.

double post. Stupid blank page thingy.

last edited by darkjedi at 11:24:27 15/Jul/09

Hey wtf happened to my post. It just timed out! YOU BASTARD.

This is just a commission finding right? This doesn't mean that the Government is going to put it in place.

If it does happen it'll be pretty great though.

you think this includes comics?

I know that to buy a standard marvel comic here normally costs around $8 an issue. Or i could grab a whole trade from amazon for about $15.
Also had some subscriptions and each comic cost me about $2..... Saved myself a lot of cash getting them from America.

Hmm which post should I keep. I might leave them both!

Yeah, Book Depository for the win. I ordered 5 books from there a few weeks ago, all arrived within about 10 days (separately) - local cost would have been about $150, cost me about $80 including (free) shipping.

Penny Arcade is about the most expensive books I'd buy here at $25each, but paying $25 for novels? Screw that.

i get my comics & magazines from the petrie paper mill... they come out a bit late but the price is right :D

books are a f***ing rip these days. Waited for part 2 of the peter f hamilton void series to come out in regular size paperback... $22.95. Books used to be $16.95 or $12.95 only a few years ago.

surely it would be based on markup though zy?

Okay they've found Australia gets ripped for books, now when are they going to figure out everything else we get ripped off with? (Games, movies, electronics, linen, clothing .. basically everything)

didn't they do this years ago with CDs

it didn't lead to the death of the local music industry did it? just cheaper CDs

Zy: From what I heard on the radio about this the commission wanted to remove the tariffs or whatever on overseas books that were published locally.

And so, wouldn't they be using the same sort of paper and stuff as Australian written & published books?

I heard a rebuttal argument from some spokeswoman from the Australian booksellers association or something and god, she was terrible. Her arguments were contradictory and almost nonsensical.

As a layman, I can't see what the problem is by removing import tariffs etc. on non-Australian written books.

Can encourage Australian authors via other means, but artificially increasing the costs for non-Australian authors just lowers the choice for Australian readers.

Qld being the smart state will put something in place to make books cheaper after this finding and just add more taxes to roads or drivers ... or just go further into debt!

if this is the same issue i think it is, that of territorial copyright, then the other side of the coin is presented here, Richard Flanagan Speech - he gets on his high horse a bit cos he has a vested interest (being an author), but it is a good, interesting read as to how and why the Australian writing scene will be impacted and particularly why chain stores are pushing for it, at the expense of independent book stores. a big issue is the use of 'returned books' which average 50 percent in the American market, and instead of these books being sold off at 1 or 2 bucks each, or pulped (with no money going to the author) they will now be able to be dumped into the australian market, allowing chain stores (such as your kmarts, big w's etc) to severely undercut local pricing.

I don't know where he gets his info from but my pick of quotes is probably

What is being proposed doesn't exist in Europe or the USA. And even if US and British publishers are allowed to dump books on our market, Australian publishers will not be allowed to do the same in theirs. In the one country in the world where the change was introduced, New Zealand, publishing has, according to the New Zealand Publishers Association, suffered, and books are now more expensive.

it is very simple to say, f*** yeah, cheaper books, without considering what else happens as a result of these laws being repealed. i am all for cheaper books, but not at the expense of australian talent and local business, as such when i do buy books i buy from local bookstores (folio books ftw) and i visit the library a hell of a lot more than i ever used to as well.

i had an interesting conversation with a lecturer (published author himself) who was of the opinion it will be bad for australia's book industry (writers/publishing houses/bookshops etc etc) but better cost wise for the consumer, and he was of the opinion it could return australia to a 'captive audience' of overseas markets. he is also of the opinion that books will eventually become like vinyl lp's - objects of art and collectors, rather than the norm.

About the f***ing time. It's so depressing looking at books retail prices in AU and then looking at how much them overseas people pay for the same book...

Thanks for the Book Depository link! Just paid $60 for Antony Beevor's new war history book D-Day, now I see I could have had it for about $35 including postage :( Next time.

I was interested to see how much of the cost of a book is bound up (swidt?) in printing costs, if anyone has looked at ebook readers like the Kindles you'd have noticed that ebooks are still not much cheaper than printed, even though there is zero printing or distributions cost.

Politician would be cheaper if we imported them from China too.
But i cant see that happening.

This is bad news for Aussie jobs involved with Printing. Your cheap book comes at the expense of others Jobs.
Apparently Aussie writers will receive no money for books printed outside Australia.

What is being proposed doesn't exist in Europe or the USA. And even if US and British publishers are allowed to dump books on our market, Australian publishers will not be allowed to do the same in theirs.

This is what really gets up my nose about Free Trade.
We destroy our local manufacturing industries by allowing other countries to dump there cheap lower quality products in our country but *They put barriers up when we want to sell things in their countries.

last edited by FaceMan at 15:41:30 15/Jul/09

so what - dump away

artificially inflating prices in order to sustain 'local' industries is stealing from consumers, pure and simple

at the least it is socialism, and i'm not paying double price for books and rolling out the welcome mat for the reds

Socialism ! Yes we can.

easy there barack osama

We destroy our local manufacturing industries by allowing other countries to dump there cheap lower quality products in our country but put barriers up when we want to sell things in their countries.

hey faceman, go google the concept called 'comparative advantage', have a read and then get back to me. this should clear up your nonsensical posts about trade theory.

regards

taggs

Our government seems obsessed with creating jobs in China and destroying jobs in Australia. They wont be happy til we are all down the mines working for Brother #1.

hi faceman,

i see you are still having difficulties understanding some basic economic concepts, i'm sorry to hear that. if you try the steps outlined in my above post you should see these problems clear right up. let me know how it goes.

regards

taggs

the 3 year delay is so Conroy can censor them all with his iron first

I'm scepticial about this. While I'm looking forward to cheaper prices, I don't want local publishers out of business.

last edited by Triamks at 16:55:34 15/Jul/09

I've finished reading that linked article but then I had to google what Territorial Copyright means because the author didn't actually bother to explain it. Though the result of a quick google search just brought up another article which mentioned a 30/90 rule which apparently gives Australian copyright to Australian publishers for overseas works if they get the rights for them if they publish it within 30 days of the overseas release and they keep that copyright if they don't let 90 days lapse of not providing it to Australians.

And then they made an Underpants Gnomes worthy leap to say that this helps Australian authors somehow.

One of the complaints I saw raised were concerns that a book written by an Australian author but published overseas might not sell so it's "remaindered" or something so that it can be sold for only a couple of dollars with no royalties going to the author and that these cut-price versions can be dumped back in Australia into chain stores like Coles and Woolies (well K-Mart and Big W I imagine) for a lot less than the other book stores are charging for the normal versions and that the author sees nothing.

Obviously, the solution to this is:
a) Hello, if the book sells for anything, then maybe the author should be getting royalties. Who the f*** cares if it's "remaindered" or not. If the book gets sold for anything, then the author should see royalties for the first-sale. Allowing anything else is just a scam and the target of the anger should be directed at those trying to rip off the authors by allowing this.

b) If the author is Australian then fine, let the author set the minimum first-sale price for the book selling in Australia, be it published by Australian publishers or imported from overseas (obviously to be sold at a retailer as opposed to just ordering it online etc).
That way the prices of books by Australian authors aren't being slashed too far below what the author wants to charge of it and they still get royalties.

As for books written by overseas authors, again, if the books are "remaindered" so that the authors get nothing then that's a problem for those overseas authors and the stripping of their rights by the greedy corporations exploiting them, but otherwise who cares if they get sold for cheap here? It's good for consumers.

But then yeah, maybe that will lead to Australian books costing more compared to non-Australian books (though when the Australian book sells the Australian author is still getting their royalties at least) because the overseas books are being "remaindered".

If remaindering is such a problem then fine, either disallow the practice of "remaindering" in Australia (either by imports or locally) or set the tariffs on such imports so that to sell an imported book here (written by a foreign author) the minimum price is the same as it would be in the country of the author if not-remaindered.

I can't however why an Australian publisher needs to have copyright on a book written by an author overseas however so that Australian books can flourish.

yeah he didn't explain territorial copyright cos he was doing a speech at the sydney writers festival so the audience would know notionally what he was on about.
i haven't really looked too much into it, i must admit, and I was just going off what my lecturer had said/that speech i linked, but here is another article i found via google about the impact upon the australian book industry Territorial Copyright issues

if they could import what they cant now, would that possible see us getting a local amazon.com.au finally ???

as someone said it happened to cd's 2-4years ago, prices only came down a small bit.

saying that i bought a book while i was in FIJI, a cook book, $6aud, about 60 pages of picture perfect glossy pics and recipes.

Publisher is in australia, Printed in china.

Quality was excellent, so it seems is certainly possible to still make money as a publish house and have things printed overseas, where it hurts is aus jobs, but i mean how *automated* is the printing process these days anyway?

Bump.

Lawfont has provided the super-depressing news that this change is not going to happen.

The Minister for Innovation has decided to ignore the Productivity Commission’s recommendations, and not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government. In other words, publishers get to keep their territorial exclusivity for books, and the government thinks we should all get e-Readers instead (seriously, that’s practically in the press release).

Gans says it all really – the government, having spent the first year or two of their governmental life commissioning independent reviews and reports of various kinds has shown that lobbying can overturn any recommendations that result. Look forward to an increase in the lobbying population in Canberra.

From the reports, Labor has totally ignored the analysis and recommendations and is doing this to protect the small minority of Australian authors at the expense of the rest of us, who will continue to get royally screwed on book prices as a result.

I'm sure there'll be more in this to come as this announcement only occurred today; hopefully JJJ continue their coverage of this and chase up a few noteworthy people like they did a while back.

This is very s*** news. And I can't even buy ebooks cheaply. f***ing industry.

we're getting ripped off for groceries and fuel too, what are they gonna do about that? maybe a fuelwatch or a grocerywatch website could help.

Political structure fail.
This is just like the drug czar in England. The old 'guy in charge' vs 'team of experts' chestnut.
And this is a government commission we are talking about, it's not the same as ausgamers admins rejecting my ideas, and for a while there I was convinced I could insinuate it was.

last edited by thermite at 18:17:02 12/Nov/09

The Minister for Innovation has decided to ignore the Productivity Commission’s recommendations, and not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government. In other words, publishers get to keep their territorial exclusivity for books, and the government thinks we should all get e-Readers instead (seriously, that’s practically in the press release).

shows how ignorant they are because e-readers have to abide by parallel import restrictions as well. the AU amazon kindle store is significantly smaller than the US amazon kindle store. also, other ebook retailers often won't sell to australians or a lot of their titles are not available to australians. major fail imo. i've been buying a lot of titles through the UK kindle store. yay for having a UK postal address and credit card :)

if you interested in the other side of the debate the comments on this blog are a pretty good start. i think if you want to subsidise australian authors there are much better ways than screwing over the consumer.

also: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ - maybe even better than amazon :)

the best way to protest this decision is to just stop buying books in australia. its probably cheaper and it will f*** over the a****** publishers who lobbied for this rule to be preserved.

last edited by hast at 18:29:46 12/Nov/09

f*** hast that blog made me rage, I have dived in to e-slay them dragons

the best way to protest this decision is to just stop buying books in australia. its probably cheaper and it will f*** over the a****** publishers who lobbied for this rule to be preserved.

Yep I'm off to bookdepository right now to start investing in overseas economies once again!

A decision that keeps Jobs in Australia.
How very rare.

Been using fishpond here for a while, the local is blackcat books which is a second hand dealer with a try your luck flavor. Trog you did raise some very valid points on the blog though

are you a complete raving protectionist faceman? do you have any idea how rich international trade has made australia?

No other countries run protectionist policies ?

A decision that keeps Jobs in Australia.
How very rare.

haha are you f***ing serious? how do you figure? this protects a TINY HANDFUL of people at the expense of the majority. Anyone with half a f***ing brain and Internet access should be going straight to the Internet for their books now; they'd be stupid to keep getting raped in bookshops. Never mind the fact that most bookshops in Australia are utterly useless anyway, even the major chains - if you want even remote variety in Brisbane you have Borders.. uh, and that's it (unless that big huge Dymocks is still around, but I think I heard it shut down).

Almost every weekend I go to Indro and do a round of all the bookstores - QBD, A&R and Dymocks. It's more out of habit than any desire to see what they have, because 99% of the time it's the same as the week before. And f*** me, when I see a shelf full of the latest Dan Brown drivel I want to cry; I know they're in the business of selling to the majority, but for people like me that actually like other stuff, having shelf space reserved for a handful of books is a real pain in the ass. Especially when we then get the pleasure of paying 2-4 times as much as what you can get it for in the US.

I've moved almost exclusively to ebooks now, and then I buy real copies whenever I can pick them up cheaply.

The WORST part about this decision though is that it makes it MORE EXPENSIVE FOR PEOPLE TO READ. Getting people to read is a hard enough job anyway now with all the other distractions; I think it's one of the best things anyone can do with their time ever. But who is going to bother when you walk into a store and see a 300 page s***ty paperback that's 40 years old is twenty dollars?

But who is going to bother when you walk into a store and see a 300 page s***ty paperback that's 40 years old is twenty dollars?

You looking to buy Gone With the Wind?

Faceman, how is it a good thing to make Australians pay more for basic goods. For 50 bucks is it not better to get 2 books than 1? are we not a richer country then?

this is pretty insane, yet another reason why europe > rest of the world

The prices for books here are a joke, I bought a bunch of books from amazon.co.uk when I was in Ireland and even the Irish book stores are much cheaper compared to Australia prices.

I am pretty sure amazon ship globally, the shipping from UK to Ireland was seriously next to nothing for books/DVD's i.e. a few euro's tops per order, which was awesome!

i dont have to buy my books, i have hookups (at my library)

goddamn faceman says some stupid s***

the publishers now want amazon et al to start collectin GST.

The head of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler, flagged a campaign to require overseas online retailers to collect GST from Australian customers.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/books-decision-a-windfall-for-amazon-says-fels-20091111-ia0a.html

shameless

Why are clueless people allowed to make public comments?

Surely if any taxes were going to be collected from imported books it would be a duty anyway.

gst is a tax on the supply of goods and services within australia. if the good or service wasn't purchased/provided within australia how the f*** can they legally claim to put gst on it? im no taxation lawyer but that sounds a bit strange to me.

also @ faceman's job comment:

''This will kill booksellers, because booksellers still have to pay the inflated prices of imported books,'' he said. ''The internet competitors are buying on a free market and they get prices far lower.''

Professor Fels said the decision to explicitly reject a recommendation of the Productivity Commission meant that ''every time one of our more than 10 million book readers visit a bookshop and pay more for books, the Government will be and should be held responsible''.

His claim on store closures was backed by book retailers, who said 3000 jobs would be put at risk. The retailer group the Coalition for Cheaper Books pledged to continue to campaign on the issue.

taken straight from the article hast posted. quote is from allen fels, ex head of the ACCC. and it seems more retail jobs are at risk than writers' jobs.

trog you can't find anything decent cos you go to s*** bookstores - check out places like folio books on albert st, avid reader in west end, river bend books in bulimba, pulp fiction in the city, there are a number of awesome independents out there, even coaldrakes and mary ryan's are better than A&R, QBD etc.

I realise these aren't in as convenient locations for some people, but meh. if you want scifi/fantasy stuff, the best range I've seen (in a bricks and mortar store) is in Borders in the city - but I don't really read much of that so there could be better out there.

I generally find multiple books I want every time I go into foliobooks, i'm kind of dreading the day that I'm not in the city for uni and can't go browse there. plus, pretty sure you can buy off their website too.

What amazes me about FaceMan is that seemingly smart people not only read posts that sit next to his avatar - a massive warning sign - but worse muster the energy to reply to them.

last edited by Hogfather at 14:22:24 13/Nov/09

you're a towel.

trog you can't find anything decent cos you go to s*** bookstores - check out places like folio books on albert st, avid reader in west end, river bend books in bulimba, pulp fiction in the city, there are a number of awesome independents out there, even coaldrakes and mary ryan's are better than A&R, QBD etc.

I've been to most of those bookstores.. they're OK. Yep, I realise QBD etc are all s***, but it's like they're not even TRYING. I mean, they must know there are other bookstores in Indro, right? Why not carry some different stuff, instead of all the same things?

Borders is the only option for me; those indy bookstores are neat but I'd rather the range of a big one.

it is just another case of the government protecting an industry that isn't profitable on its own instead of letting it fail.

it is almost like these guys just love throwing good money away.

Australian car industry anyone?

nah was directed at trog - he was complaining about the bookstores at indro. i have reasonably eclectic taste so my recommendations might not be to most peoples taste.

yeah trog - i totally agree, they carry only the stuff that is on 'best sellers' lists (which end up self fulfilling prophecies because people just buy whats on the 'best sellers' list, etc etc) and not much else. they don't branch out because it seems like people won't buy it (not that they are really given a chance these days, unless they visit and independent/have the book recommended to them etc)