Tag Archives: #publishing

Cooking the books?

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Over the many years I have been writing this blog, I have often commented on the publishing industry, from my personal experiences, to industry trends and future outlook. The recent collapse of Australia’s online bookseller, Booktopia, prompted me to revisit the topic.

First, a declaration – I am an unsecured retail creditor of Booktopia. Orders for books I  paid for in advance of their publication dates still have not been fulfilled. Obviously, I am not alone; there are about 170k retail creditors, owed a total of $15m. That is an average of about $90 per creditor, although some retail customers are owed more than $10k.

Second, Booktopia’s total debts of around $60m are nearly one third of annual turnover ($198m in FY2023). In FY2022, annual turnover was $240m. Clearly, this was a business in decline, and in financial trouble.

Third, I should have been alert to the problems when I enquired about my outstanding orders, shortly before the administrators were called in. I knew the books had already been published, so I wanted to know when to expect them. This was part of the reply I received, in mid-June:

“We have been experiencing difficulties procuring new stocks from our supplier lately, we are so sorry for the delay.”

Fourth, it transpires that publishers, wholesalers and distributors were experiencing payment delays from Booktopia. Suppliers were reducing or cutting off their credit lines, and declining to supply more stock unless the existing debts were cleared. The administrators are doing their best to realise any remaining value of the business, including a trade sale of Booktopia (as a whole, or as parts). The assets include warehouse stock (some of which may still be owned by the publishers/wholesalers), customer lists, technology, goodwill and other IP. But it was made pretty clear at the first creditors’ meeting that unsecured trade and retail creditors should not expect to get their money back any time soon, and certainly not in full. (A total of $15m in secured debt will get preference, including employees.) So even if the unfulfilled but paid-for stock can be located, there is no apparent obligation for outstanding orders to be completed. In fact, the administrators were suggesting that retail creditors should contact their banks or credit card providers, to see if they could recover their money via those channels. (Which is why insurance premiums, card fees and bank charges go up, of course.)

I don’t understand why Booktopia’s retail and trade debts were allowed to get to such a high percentage of their turn over. Book publishing and distribution shouldn’t be that hard – either the book is in stock at Booktopia, and can be sent immediately, or it is available to order from suppliers and can be fulfilled within a reasonable time. For books that have not yet been printed, surely the customer’s money should be held in some sort of escrow account, and the cash not accessible by the seller or recognised as revenue until the order has been completed?

Of course, books go out of print, and customers may have to wait for a re-print or a new edition. Or the industry needs to consider print-on-demand solutions. Funnily enough, that is one of the key recommendations of the Ad Rem report on the Australian publishing industry (“The Australian Book Industry: Challenges and Opportunities”) in 2001….

Next week: Notes from the UK

 

 

Literary triggers

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Reading for pleasure should be a joy in itself. But to read a book and then be drawn into somewhat tangential (and even trivial) thoughts triggered by personal recollections is an added bonus.

That was partly my reaction when reading Jonathan Coe’s marvelous novel “Mr Wilder and Me”. Ostensibly a fictional account about the making of one of Billy Wilder’s final films, set in Greece and France in the mid-1970s, it manages to incorporate many themes – Hollywood, the creative process, migration, family, the Holocaust, ageing, travel – without selling any of them short. Happily, it’s now being made into a film itself, which confirms the strong narrative at the core of the book. I look forward to seeing it when it is released.

For myself, the novel prompted three travel-related memories:

1. Just like a key time in the novel, my first visit to Greece was also a few years after the collapse of the military junta – currency restrictions, banks only open a couple of hours a day, rationing of hot water in the hostel where I was staying, and construction projects abandoned unfinished because of their association with the military regime

2. The narrator’s love of cheese, stemming from an impromptu visit to a Brie maker, brought back memories of many trips to Paris in the 80s and 90s, and visits to bars like La Tartine, and trying the different types of crottin

3. On my first trip to California, I was fortunate enough to have drinks at the Hotel del Coronado, the setting for Billy Wilder’s most famous film, “Some Like It Hot”, and an iconic resort facility in San Diego Bay.

Seemingly unconnected, yet all evoked by a single work of fiction.

Next week: Let There Be Light

Literary legacies

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As more classic works of literature come out of copyright protection, and enter the public domain, publishers and booksellers can look forward to sales of re-packaged titles, for which they won’t have to pay royalties. With the right combination of content and marketing, it’s as good as free money.

Under the Berne Convention, copyright in published works is the life of the author plus 50 years, although many territories have extend this to life plus 70 years (100 in Mexico!). These periods may be subject to extensions if the executors of literary estates are able to renew the existing copyright (under previous copyright regimes) or by issuing revised editions of existing works which are sufficiently different to the original so as to constitute an entirely separate publication – but these are exceptions.

By allowing copyright to lapse, this should mean key works will always be in print, and even more obscure titles can be revived with little to no production cost. For nearly 20 years, Google Books has been scanning works out of copyright and putting them online. But even this process can run into copyright limitations, and questions of provenance (as illustrated by the treatment of George Orwell’s “1984”). But this has also encouraged some enterprising individuals to sell “reprints” of facsimile copies of scanned titles, when the buyer thought they were purchasing an authentic copy, or a contemporary edition (i.e., newly typeset and printed).

Intellectual property law may be complex, and in need of reform to reflect modern technology and contemporary society. But as copyright works pass into the public domain, there remains the issue of moral rights. These give writers the right to be identified as the author of a work (“attribution”), and to protect their work against inappropriate use (“derogatory treatment”). Moral rights also protect writers against “false attribution” – i.e., a publisher can’t claim a work was written by an author who didn’t actually write it.

Moral rights vary from country to country (e.g., Germany, UK, USA, Australia), but generally do not survive when copyright expires. Which can mean that unscrupulous publishers may feel emboldened to “modify” original texts at will, given some recent examples of key 20th century novels. Surely not what authors and their legacies should be subject to?

Next week: Public Indifference?

Synchronicity

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I’m not sure I fully subscribe to Jung’s theory of Synchronicity, where causally unrelated events occur at the same time, and seemingly take on a significant meaning; in many cases, a coincidence is just that. But recently I have been forced to consider the possibility that maybe Jung was right.

Over the past few months, I have been reading the 12 novels that comprise Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”. Although I had never read them before, the books were familiar to me through a BBC Radio adaptation broadcast between 1979 and 1982, and a UK television mini-series from 1997.

Last weekend, and quite unrelated, a friend posted some music on-line – recordings made by the band we were in during the early 1980s. One of the tracks was a song I had written at that time, and whose title had been inspired by Powell’s magnum opus. But I hadn’t listened to or thought about this song for nearly 40 years.

Separately, and also by coincidence, in the last couple of days I have been listening to “The New Anatomy of Melancholy”, another BBC Radio series that draws its inspiration (and title) from Robert Burton’s 17th century tract on mood disorders. This series was first broadcast in May 2020 – no doubt prompted by the onset of the global pandemic, with its lock-downs, self-isolation and increased anxiety. And now the programme is being repeated, exactly 400 years after the publication of Burton’s original treatise – and at a time when we need his sage advice more than ever.

Until now, I hadn’t appreciated how self-absorbed (obsessed?) Powell’s narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is by Burton – he even ends up publishing an academic text about this prescient Elizabethan writer. On one level, Jenkins is a proxy for his literary hero (as well as being Powell’s alter ego), and much of the 12-novel sequence is a response to Burton’s analysis on the causes of, and cures for, melancholia.

All of which may or may not prove Jung’s theory, but there is for me something of a personal thread between Powell, a song I wrote, and the BBC’s recent update on Burton.

Next week: The Last Half-Mile