Reading the news yesterday that the United States bookstore chain Border has gone into bankruptcy, I began to ask myself how long it could possibly be before a big Australian chain met the same fate. Unfortunately the wait wasn’t long.
A press release came out that afternoon announcing that REDGroup, who control Borders Australia, Angus and Robertson and Whitcoulls in New Zealand, were being placed into administration. This will affect 260 stores.
Really, it is a wonder this didn’t happen earlier given that Australian booksellers have been defying the laws of market theory that would have sent other businesses bust long ago. There are a few reasons why this was pretty inevitable. One involves parallel import laws and the other the internet, but the two are closely linked.
We pay more than we should for books in this country because of the parallel import laws that mean we can’t buy books also published in America or Europe if an Australian publisher wants to publish the book. In turn, the protected status of Australian publishing rights drives up the price we pay at the counter because of a lack of competition.
Publishers and most sellers argue this is justified, because it allows them to make profits on the bestsellers and then pump money back into Australian literature, that otherwise wouldn’t be viable for them to publish. Furthermore, they also argue that if the market is flooded with cheap imports then we won’t buy Australian books.
This argument is largely bunkum. For all the pained bleating from Australian publishers about “Australians loving Australian voices” and “the need to protect our culture”, it comes down to them protecting profits - and largely from the mass selling Dan Brown type of stuff that they regularly bemoan.
The laws are protectionism in an era when other tariffs have been all but abolished in other industries (perhaps with the exception of our nationalised car industry). The same arguments about the end of Australian music culture were made in relation to parallel imports of CDs, and they have been shown to be rubbish. If people are buying more non-Australian (especially American) music and books – this is a pretty out there theory – perhaps they just prefer it?
It’s also interesting how willing people are to jump down the throat of a whitegoods retailer when he moans about internet sales, but get a bunch of luvvies in a room to be addressed by celebrity authors making ostensibly similar arguments, and all that free market logic and concern for the consumer dissipates.
Anyway, the argument was made and lost in cabinet last year when Kevin Rudd came down on the side of the luvvies, despite some of his ministers siding with the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to lift the ban.
The really strange thing about the parallel import debate is it ignores the fact people are already conducting their own parallel imports over the internet. You know when you buy a book from Amazon or the Book Depository for about half the price than you would in Australia? That is just a form of parallel importing, and obviously a lot of Australians have caught on.
Recently in a Borders store I asked about a book of essays from a very prominent UK author. I was told that they didn’t have it in stock but they could order it in. For the privilege of waiting a couple of weeks I would then pay $35 for the book.
Unimpressed, I went home and logged on to Amazon. It sold me the book I wanted and another book by the same guy for just over US$20 including delivery. This was the first time I’d used the internet to buy a book, previously labouring under the misapprehension that it was better to buy from bookstores. Bookstores are nice places, but not so nice that I feel the need to pay about at least 20 per cent extra for the privilege of entering them.
Of course US booksellers face similar pressures from the internet as well as struggling with the growth of e-books, but Australian publishers and retailers are further handicapped by the fact they charge more than their US counterparts and simply won’t be able to compete anymore. Even stranger, it’s a self-imposed handicap.
Don’t expect any kind of mea culpa from the publishers or retailers who have held the line over imports. They’ll come back with the same arguments used during the Productivity Commission debate: the US and UK don’t have parallel imports so why we should we? Because we pay more than these countries in shops, and will continue to do so, so publishers and retailers can protect a market. Or what’s left of that market.
So while we may still be paying more for books than others countries, it might soon be a pretty moot point given that there will be very few stores to buy them from – along with many new “Australian voices” looking for a job.
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