Protectionism Means You Pay More For Books
As you buy Christmas presents remind yourself that Federal Government policy requires you to pay up to 30 percent more for books, according to the Productivity Commission, than you would in an open market. When the Rudd Cabinet this year rejected the strong arguments of reform-minded ministers and dumped on the Productivity Commission’s report it meant local bookshops continued to be blocked from sourcing stock from overseas if an Australian publisher wants to publish it more expensively here.
The justification is that this subsidises publishers and allows them to support Australian literature. Remove this restriction on bookshops and, the publishers argue, Australian literature would vanish in puff of smoke.
Many readers might have trouble nominating any especially illuminating works appearing in the last year that would justify the one third impost on their Christmas book-buying. But there’s a more potent objection to the publishers’ naked self-interest : ask them to nominate a single work by an Australian author they brought into print not because they thought it would sell but because publication would keep our culture alive.
They have never been able to nominate a single title.
They used the same desperate argument before the mid-1990s to justify blocking American books entering Australia. We had to wait until a British publisher got around to bringing the American title into print before we could get the book -say, a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt – into bookshops here. The Keating government at least got rid of that restriction partly at my urging (a long time, incidentally, before I joined the board of Australian-owned retailer, Dymocks).
We opened the music market. The result has been cheaper CDs and more Australian music being recorded and sold than ever. It’s the old story : protection in the end hurts everyone. Cheaper books will mean more sales and that means – for authors – more royalties.