Outback Spectrum

Embarrassing confession: today I spent over 3 hours at Outback Steakhouse, chilling with my home-girl Jac. For some reason, the feng shui of my previous place of employment was so perfect that we bought a paper and read it cover to cover and worked on cross-words and sudokus. Though not successfully. Not a single puzzle was completed.

In the Spectrum section of the paper, I found a rather confronting article. According to Richard Flanagan, the Australian publishing industry is facing something of a crises. 

"Bookselling in America, like Australia, runs on a consignment system. Where it differs is that return rates there are typically 50 per cent. These returned, unsold books are generally pulped or remaindered - sold off for one or two dollars, the author receiving no payment. Under this proposal these returned books will now be able to be dumped on the Australian market like Italian canned tomatoes.

Thus even a hugely successful Tim Winton novel - a book that enables his publisher here, Penguin Australia, to nurture new Australian writers of talent - could end up in Australian remainder bins. A dumped US hardback of Breath would be far cheaper than an Australian paperback, but with no royalty payable to the author and no profit to their Australian publisher.

The effects of this would be two fold: it would ultimately force major Australian writers to publish out of the USA to protect their own interests, with all the sorry consequences that would entail, while it would see the destruction of support for the next generation of Tim Wintons as Australian publishers went to the wall, or survived as they did for the best part of two centuries, as distributors for imperial wares made elsewhere for others."

Now this is truly shitty news for Australian writers and Australian readers. Basically it sucks for everyone involved. So, friends, buy your independent books while you still can, because they just might not be there tomorrow.

Damn, Rudd, what are you even doing? First a war on binge drinking, now on literature? You're making it very difficult for me to continue supporting you...