I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy:

Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted on 19 March for ‘failure to comply with a lawful order’. Apparently it’s a felony to be even slightly groggy and hesitant when told to lie down on the ground by someone who has just punched you repeatedly in the face for asking a question. Sentencing should follow in late April. As they phrased it at Making Light: ‘Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard.’ Another notable victory in the War Against Tourism.

“The War Against Tourism”! I love it.

Of course, it’s no so funny for Watts. For his part in the incident where he was stopped, bullied, and beaten up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers – whilst trying to return home to Canada – he now faces up to two years in prison.

Dear Mr. Conroy,

I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and the Party the benefit of the doubt here – once such a mechanism is in place, the possibility of abuse by this government or future governments is unacceptable.

Please do not respond with assurances. You cannot predict what this government may choose to censor in the future. You certainly have no control over what future governments may choose to censor and for what purposes. The mere existence of such a mechanism will provide the temptation as well as the means. The lack of transparency of the blacklist (which can always be manipulated) will mean Australians can no longer trust their government not to be hiding information from them. Australia is one of the finest democracies on the planet, but with this filter in place, we will never be able to speak out against political or ideological censorship again. We will be no better than China and we will be far worse than any other Western democracy.

Whatever your motives for censoring the Internet – and let’s hope and pray they are good – a mandatory filter is the wrong solution. Whatever you intend to use it for, you will have created the potential for serious abuse. Whatever your beliefs about the moral integrity of future Australian governments, while such a filter exists there will always be the suspicion – because there will always be the possibility – that it is being abused for political or ideological ends.

I am a lifelong supporter of the labour movement and come from a poor, working class background. There are few things a Labor government could do to change the way I vote. Censoring the Internet with mandatory filtering would be one of them. I would swap my vote immediately to any party that would promise to scrap it and that might stand a chance of achieving power. That is because such a filter strikes at the very heart of democracy and puts everything I believe in at risk.

Regards,

Graham Storrs.

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on.

Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. They have done us all a great service. Today, a press release from Craig Emerson’s office announced: ‘The Government has decided not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government.’

It goes on:

‘Australian book printing and publishing is under strong competitive pressure from international online booksellers such as Amazon and The Book Depository and the Government has formed the view that that this pressure is likely to intensify.

‘In addition, the technology of electronic books (e-books) like Kindle Books will continue to improve with further innovations and price reductions expected.

‘The Government has not accepted the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to remove the parallel importation restrictions on books.

‘The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture. The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

‘The Government has decided not to commit to a new spending program for Australian authors and publishers.

‘Compromise proposals were considered, involving reductions in the length of the 30-day publication rule and the 90-day resupply rule.

‘In the circumstances of intense competition from online books and e-books, the Government judged that changing the regulations governing book imports is unlikely to have any material effect on the availability of books in Australia.

‘If books cannot be made available in a timely fashion and at a competitive price, customers will opt for online sales and e-books.

‘Introducing a price cap along the lines of the Canadian system would increase regulation with questionable effects on book prices.

‘The Australian book printing and publishing industries will need to respond to the increasing competition from imports without relying on additional government assistance.’

Please note that 3rd-from-last sentence, “If books cannot be made available, etc..” It was the book sellers of Australia (supermarkets and department stores included) who wanted to trash Australian publishing for the sake of larger profits by changing the PIR legislation. I think that sentence puts them firmly back in their box. However, it also points those of us who are concerned about Australian writing to where the next big battle will be fought.

There is a petition up on the GoPetition site, addressed to, “THE HONOURABLE THE SPEAKER AND MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT” which people concerned about the government’s insane plan to lift parallel importation restrictions on books can sign. The text is as follows:

(Preamble):

The Australian Government is considering whether to abolish the Restrictions on Parallel Imports of Books into Australia. If it goes ahead this action will have drastic effects on Australian-authored fiction and non-fiction books – and causing the loss of many jobs in the publishing, printing and distribution industries. For further information go to http://savingaussiebooks.wordpress.com/

Petition:

We, the undersigned, ask the Parliament to retain the current restrictions on the Parallel Importation of books for the following reasons:1. There is no guarantee books will be cheaper, but removing the Restrictions will cause severe job losses in the publishing, book printing, packaging, and distribution industries.

2. The diversity of local and international book titles will diminish as publishers are forced to make smaller print runs, and take fewer risks with new authors.

3. Australian authors should not be forced to rely on unspecified extra taxpayer funded grants and subsidies, as suggested by the Productivity Commission, to compensate income lost under Parallel Importation.

4. Imported versions of Australian-authored books will be in direct competition with authentic editions. Foreign versions often change drastically to suit overseas markets – removing Australian idioms, references, humour and spelling. This is of particular concern for those Australian children who already struggle with spelling and literacy.

If you want to preserve Australia’s publishing industry, Australian writers, and books written in an Australian ‘voice’, you should seriously consider signing this petition.

Well, you all know I’m home by now. I just want to summarise my experiences at the Byron Bay Writers Festival before I forget.

The BBWF is only the second writers’ festival I’ve been to but it was similar to the other one in many ways. The big differences were in the venues. The Brisbane Writers Festival, last year, was held in the State Library in Brisbane. That meant the workshops were in antiseptic, modern buildings, and the panels and presentations were in marquees in the grounds. Catering was by the library cafe which is uncomfortable and just a little pretentious. Byron had a very different feel to it. The workshops were dotted around the town in odd places – wooden buildings in the high street, upstairs rooms at the back of art galleries, and so on. The main event was in a big field outside the town with marquees sprawling everywhere. Catering was in its own marquee and was rather more basic but involved great coffee and friendly staff.

I felt much more at ease and relaxed at the Byron Bay event than I had been at the Brisbane one. The weather was great, of course, and the nearness of the beach gave everything a holiday feel.

Sadly, the two workshops I had signed up for were a complete waste of time. I didn’t get a thing out of either of them – which is pretty hard to achieve, I’d say – and, judging by the grumbling afterwards from my fellow attendees, others felt the same. In fact, both workshops were so arm-wavy, vague and internally inconsistent, I’m glad this was not my first experience of a writers’ festival. If it had been, I would never have gone to another writing workshop, ever.

The panels saved the day, however. There was some very interesting stuff on offer. Well, actually, let me start that again. There were loads of panels and presentations, book launches and signings – five parallel streams for three days – all with titles that made me want to run a mile. Yet I found that everything I wandered into was interesting, stimulating and entertaining. One of the biggest surprises was a panel called “Living and losing: the writing of grief”. You wouldn’t expect that to be enthralling, now, would you? But it was. Then there was “Worlds in words: making language work,” which I went to see only because Kate Eltham was chairing it. This started out pretty much as you’d expect but eventually turned into a riot as ‘performance poet’ David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger stole the show, giving an impromptu performance of one of his pieces at the request of the audience.

I was surprised to find that the bookshop at the main event was run by Dymocks. Strangely enough, there was no mention of their invidious Campaign for Cheaper Books, no mention anywhere about the stirling work Dymocks is doing to encourage the government to lift Parallel Importation Restrictions. Sadly, there were no protests outside the Dymocks tent. Writers seemed perfectly happy to go inside and buy books from the people who are trying to undermine and destroy the Australian publishing industry. Oddly enough, Dymocks seemed to be able to sell books, even though they were published in Australia and were not overseas imports. If you want to know what on Earth I’m on about, please visit the Saving Aussie Books website.

I didn’t meet up with anybody who told me they’d be there. In fact, I didn’t see a single face I recognised (apart from Kate’s). Not surprising, really, but a bit of a shame since I was bursting to tell people about my new book contract.

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be to find a publisher overseas – probably in the US or the UK where they will still have parallel importation restrictions and healthy publishing industries. For Australian readers – for readers everywhere – the only chance to read an Australian book, in an Australian setting, and in an Australian voice will be… Well, there won’t really be much chance of that at all.

Unless…

Unless Australian publishing doesn’t just roll over and die when the market is flooded with American remaindered books and competition becomes impossible. Because there will be an opportunity hiding in the weedy wasteland of what once was a thriving, local publishing industry. Australian publishing could go digital.

The world is just waiting for the huge, global digital book publishers of the future to emerge. By default, these will be Amazon and Google, but what if backs-to-the-wall Australian publishers refused to go down and, instead, re-engineered themselves into the digital content empires of the 21st Century? It wouldn’t be the first time an Australian media company had achieved world domination. All it takes is foresight and a willingness to take bold and radical action when the times call for it. Like they do. Right now.

Other countries aren’t knocking their publishing industries to the ground and kicking them ’til they bleed. So other countries’ publishing industries don’t have the incentive to get a move on and make the change ahead of the pack.

And if the Australian publishers won’t do it, it’s going to be up to us, Australia’s writers, to do something. I don’t think any of us want to have our voices silenced because a criminally negligent Government has dumped us in favour of hard-line capitalist ideology. I think we all believe there is more to Australia’s culture than being able to buy cheap American books. I think we all believe we have something to say that is relevant here and throughout the world, that we, as writers, are as good as others who happen to have viable publishing industries wherever in the world they are, and that we do not deserve to be turned into charity cases as the Productivity Commission recommends.

If our publishers can’t survive what is coming, we will have to find other ways of getting our work out. We will have to embrace the opportunities of digital publishing ourselves and make them work for us. One thing is for sure, in Australian publishing, business as usual will not be an option for any of us.

When I was a wild and untamed teenager, I used to do crazy, far-out things, like reading Jean-Paul Sartre. I forget where I read it now but he tells a story about a student coming to him to help with a decision he had to make  (about the student’s love-life if I remember correctly.) Wise old Sartre tells the lad he doesn’t need to answer his question because the young man already knows the answer. Because we choose the person we ask, said Sartre, and we know (roughly) the answer they are likely to give us, we are really only seeking authority for the decision we have already made.

This comes to mind because I’ve been pondering the word ‘productivity’. It’s one of those doublethink words which are used to disguise the true meaning of what is being said. When a businessman says, “We have had increases in productivity in each of the past four quarters,” what he probably means is that profits are up and those extra profits have been gained at the expense of making someone work harder or work cheaper. Usually this means that staff have been laid off, or that staff have been made to work longer hours, or salaries have been cut so staff are now working for less reward, or (more fashionably) jobs have been moved overseas to where people work longer and harder and more cheaply. Someone, somewhere is paying the price of these wonderful increases in ‘productivity’.

Although, strictly speaking, productivity only measures the output of a process per unit of input and is therefore distinct from profitability, which also includes the notion of the revenues generated by the output, most people who say ‘productivity’ aren’t all that subtle. They’re business people and politicians. They might as well just say ‘profitability’ and have done with it.

So, taking these two notions together – that you tend to ask the person who’s going to give you the answer you want, and that ‘productivity’ effectively means ‘profitability’ – isn’t it interesting that the Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to help it decide whether to remove parallel importation restrictions on books?

If you’re Australian, maybe you’d like to help explain to your MP or the relevant ministers that other answers are possible, ones that emphasise outcomes other than the slight possibility of cheaper books and the absolute certainty of higher profits for big-chain booksellers. Find out how at Saving Aussie Books.

The Productivity Commission was asked by the Australian Government to look into the effects of removing local copyright protection for Australian publishers as a way of reducing the cost of books in the bookshops. It has recommended that parallel importation should be stopped.

Currently Australia, like the USA and Great Britain, provides protection for its publishing industry by putting restrictions on the parallel importation of books. That is, if (within agreed timeframes) a book is published by an Australian publisher, the same book, published overseas, cannot be imported and sold here. This means that Australian publishers have the certainty they need to be able to publish a book without their business being undercut by cheap foreign imports.

The big booksellers – especially Dymocks – want to remove parallel importation restrictions so that they can import books from overseas and sell them here more cheaply than the home-grown product. They are pressing the Government to change the laws to allow this, hence the Productivity Commission study.

Cheaper books sounds like a good thing but, unfortunately, lower prices in the bookshops are not guaranteed by this move. Dymocks, for example, already charges more than the recommended retail price for the books it sells, and will probably continue to do so. Worse than this,  there are some very unpleasant consequences that will follow for Australian publishers, Australian writers, and Australian readers. Briefly, they are these:

• Without parallel importation, Australian publishers will struggle and, it is expected, most will go out of business. The economics of producing books for a market as small as Australia means Australian publishers cannot compete with overseas publishers from much larger markets – especially the American publishers.
• Without a local, Australian publishing industry, Australian authors will have to look overseas to find publishers. This will lead to three unpleasant consequences. One is that far fewer Australian writers will be published. Another is that books that have a strongly Australian setting and voice, will find it extremely difficult to find a publisher. The third is that, if an Australian author does find a publisher, their book will normally have to be ‘translated’ into the idiom of the country publishing it. This is particularly true for books published in America and means that not only will the language be changed (pavement to sidewalk, mum to mom, ute to pickup, and on and on) but religious and other sensitivities may mean whole scenes are scrapped, and locations may be changed too (a scene in Brisbane may end up being re-written for San Fransisco, for instance.)
• Without books written in an Australian voice, set in the Australia we all know, Australians will have lost their whole literature. Australian readers will no longer be able to find books by people like themselves, speaking in a voice they recognise, dealing with issues relevant to their culture. This is bad enough for adults, who may understand what is going on, but the destruction of an identifiable Australian literature will be a terrible thing to do to our children.

And why might all this happen? Because Dymocks and others want higher profits and because the Government is willing to pander to them.

If you are interested in adding your voice to the protest that is mounting against this abominable legislation, you should go to the website, ‘Saving Aussie Books‘, a rallying place for writers, publishers, book sellers, and readers. There you will find help with how to make your voice heard. But we have to hurry. This legislation could be before parliament in just a few weeks.