18 September 2009

“Will freeing parallel imports make books cheaper at the cost of authors?”

ALIA supports the removal of the restrictions upon parallel importation of books. ALIA believes greater competition will lead to an increase in the variety of books available and more competitively priced books, increasing their accessibility for Australians.



ALIA's submission to the Productivity Commission can be viewed and downloaded at:





The Productivity Commission's report can be viewed at:





The Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) held a seminar on this major issue recently. A podcast was made of the seminar and can be viewed on the seminar web page at http://www.ipria.org/events/seminar/Parallel%20Importing.html



Speakers included Professor Allan Fels, Graeme Connelly who is the CEO and Director of Melbourne University Bookshop and the president of the Australian Campus Booksellers and Professor Sam Ricketson of the Melbourne Law School.



I think that PLVN should have an adopted position on this issue and look forward to receiving your comments.


1 comment:

Elisabeth Jackson said...

I attended the session at Melbourne University last week and it was very itneresting. The speakers were Alan Fels, the University Bookshop CEO and a number of academics from Economics and Law. All of them supported the Productivity Commission recommendations. They felt that the predictions of gloom for Australian writers were vastly exaggerated. They pointed out that the writers who benefit from the current restrictions are Bryce Courtney, Thomas Kenneally etc. and the struggling authors get very little out of it. (same as PLR). If we want to support struggling writers it is much more efficient to do this through the Literature Board rather than making all Australians pay more for books. One of the law academics brought up an example of a book - "Hell has habour views" about nasty goings on in the Australian legal and corporate world. If this cost 10 times as much as a book on similar shenanigans in Britain or the US he would still buy it rather than the overseas one.