Literature

Editions from Elsewhere?

For quite a while, I’ve been shaping up my response to the recent Productivity Commission Research Report: Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books as part of my final-year PhD research at Murdoch University (Perth, Western Australia), where I have sought to contextualise the report’s findings within an eighty-year history of official enquiries into the Australian book trade.  I still have a little way to go before I can say I have finished collating my thoughts on it and if the length of this blog post is any indicator, it’ll be a while yet.  However, I have also sought to test many of the report’s arguments and claims within the circumstances of one specific area of publishing, the Australian novel.  This is because my PhD is concerned with how local publishers of fiction negotiated the presence of British publishers within Australia, with comparative reference to the activities of Angus & Robertson’s London Office in the United Kingdom.  Book trade enquiries are useful in this regards because they provide a kind of snapshot of the industry throughout the century, an insight into its most vocal participants, and an indicator of how the trade is externally perceived and heard (or ignored as often the case may be).

The Productivity Commission’s report is thus the latest in a long line of government attempts to obtain a handle on an industry which is structured by both cultural and commercial forces.  The current controversy surrounding one of its core recommendations – the repealing of parallel importation restrictions on books – touches many sensitive areas in Australia, from arguments about the replacement of physical books by digital equivalents (eBooks) to multinational sales-rationalising techniques that appear to threaten a local vibrant literary culture.  This is because the production and selling of the written word “transgresses the boundary between the incommensurable sacred and the marketable profane” (Miller 2006) – that is, books are perceived and operate as commodities and as ma(r)kers of culture.  Thus, with novels often the centrepiece for arguments about literary merit, national representation and commercialism, the business of bookselling generates useful case studies that join economic, social, cultural, political and legal tensions.  Therefore, to speak of restructuring the legal scaffolding underpinning the commercial activities of Australian publishers and booksellers is to, whether intentional or not, touch upon concerns about making changes to how local Australian culture is reproduced.  Understandably, it becomes a highly charged discussion.

In the context of the present debate, Australia as a population of avid readers has a long history of being a market attractive to overseas publishers.  For much of the twentieth century, the Australian market was perceived to be the “special preserve” (Harrap 1938) of some British publishers and was the largest market for British book exports to 1953.  Various laws, policies and international agreements, from the Net Book Agreement plus the Statement of Terms to the British Publishers Traditional Markets Agreement, have been attempts to dominate – and defend that domination of – the Australian market.  Many famous past Australian authors, from Miles Franklin to Vance Palmer, have lamented about the effects of this upon the broader Australian culture.  In the context of their comments, booksellers and publishers are seen to act as cultural gatekeepers and therefore the question of which visions and representations are being promoted becomes important if the images of ourselves ultimately come from elsewhere.

One claim made by the Productivity Commission’s report that sits within this theme of “elsewhere” is that “the bulk of Australian-authored titles do not have foreign editions and thus would not face competition from such editions in the domestic market [5.15]”.  This struck me as a problematic claim or at least one worth testing in relation to Australian-authored novels.  Furthermore, appendix E of the report summarises:

[M]any Australian-authored books do not appear amenable to significant, if any, parallel importation, and thus receive little or no direct benefit from their PIR protected status.  Analysis using the Neilsen BookData database suggests that, in value terms, around 72 per cent of Australian-authored trade books do not have export editions.  If the value of these Australian titles was excluded from the calculation, the estimated share of assistance to copyright holders that leaks offshore would be closer to 85 per cent.  [E.2]

This, it would seem, is interpreted from a data sample described in an earlier footnote:

In value terms, Australian-authored works accounted for 38 per cent of the top 5000, and 24 per cent of the tail [sample of 2500 editions].  The weighted average estimate is 32 per cent, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 29–36 per cent calculated using the STATA statistical package.  In volume terms, Australian authored books were estimated to account for around 31 per cent of total sales.  [E.4]

That is, the claims about foreign editions are made with regards to (if my math is correct) approximately 2500 Australian authored titles (or 38% of 5000 + 24% of 2500) for the year 2007-08.  (As an aside, given the total trade book sales data for that period comprises 455000 editions, this Australian-authored subset of 2500 books represents 0.005% of the total number of editions comprising Nielson BookScan sales data for 2007-08.)

Sampling algorithms, of course, are tightly configured to be usefully representative of trends and thus the claims held by the Productivity Commission in regards to this seemingly small sample are also reasonably held to be scalable and applicable to the much larger volume of data; hence the finding that “Australian authored books were estimated to account for around 31 per cent of total sales [E.2]”.  In other words, although it is still an estimate, the proportion of Australian-authored titles observed within the 7500 sample (top 5000 plus a random 2500 from the “tail”) is taken to be indicative of the proportion of Australian-authored books expected to exist within the complete 2007-08 database of 455000 editions.  From this, the report concludes – rather opaquely – that “[a]nalysis using the Neilsen BookData database suggests …  around 72 per cent of Australian-authored trade books do not have export editions [E.4]”.

Now I am not going to contest the commission’s methodology for statistical analysis except to admit that it is at odds with my own less sophisticated methods, which – thanks to the high processing power available to students these days – often involve parsing entire databases rather than sampling a subset for analysis.  Instead, I wish to challenge the usefulness of the sales volume approach that the report takes to obtaining foreign edition data of Australian authored books and suggest an alternative assessment with reference to another database that the commission also (lightly) consulted: AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature.

AN ALTERNATIVE METHODOLOGY

From the outset, it should be noted that one of the major issues in research on Australian novels is the problem of definition (even the commission talks of a “broad definition of Australian authorship [E.2]”).  Not only do the bibliographic lists of Australian novels vary from one authority to another but each have scope policies which overlap at the core but which become fuzzy the further one moves towards the edges, generating some anomalies between lists.  There is general agreement that H.M. Green’s two-volume seminal history on Australian literature, while not innovative in its methods, nonetheless widened conceptions of what constitutes Australian literary texts.  This “widening” or “thickening” is essentially one of the basic problems in thinking about novels in a national context:  what exactly qualifies a book to be an “Australian” novel, projecting a link to what Raymond Williams would call the “knowable community” of Australia (Said, 1994)?

To overcome classification problems, for the past three years I have used AustLit as my source of bibliographic data related to Australian novels.  As I have written elsewhere, AustLit represents a growing “structure of authority” (Bourdieu 1994) in the field of Australian creative and critical writing which has, over time, drawn to itself the cultural and institutional power to shape and set the legitimate definitions (and to influence the direction of bibliographic definition systems) for classifying Australian works.  Now a collaboration between several universities and the National Library of Australia, AustLit operates as a “networked digital research environment” building a web accessible “comprehensive bibliographic record of the nation’s literature” (Kilner, 2006) and it classifies works according to a published scope policy, a process which might be described as the “imposition of a form of thought” on the representative regime of works (Ranciere, 2006).  AustLit’s aim is to “enhance and support research and learning in Australian literature” (Wooldridge, 2005) and it achieves this through adapting online technologies to assist bibliographic discovery.

A good part of my research thus has been about developing a broad chronological overview of the general characteristics and distribution of the first edition publication (and subsequent reprinting) of “Australian novels” locally and abroad, using the data captured by AustLit that relates to the complete publication history of Australian works.  Though publishing statistics might be what Bourdieu calls a “superficial and partial identification of certain empirically verifiable regularities”, Bennett et al in their survey of “Australian everyday cultures” (1999) have demonstrated how quantitative and qualitative statistics can constitute a “novel way in which claims about cultural dominance might be explored”.

In undertaking then a statistical analysis of local versus foreign publication of Australian novels, I conducted 90 advanced searches on AustLit, filtering results according to “form”, “place of publication” and “year published” and I downloaded the results as tagged text (an option in AustLit).  The “form” element allowed me to restrict results to novels only, “place of publication” enabled grouping into supra-geographic entities (e.g.  Australia, New Zealand, China, etc) and “year published” permitted chronological ordering.  Because AustLit is recognised as the most up-to-date and exhaustive snapshot of bibliographic practices which categorise Australian-authored novels, the graphs that follow assess the distribution of nearly 17,000 first edition Australian novels and 15,000 manifestations (reprints and / or foreign editions) over a period of one hundred years.

THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Stacked Area Graph A: Number of first edition novels authored by Australian writers and first published in Australia, England, the United States of America, China and Other (comprising Europe, Africa, etc), 1900-2000 (Click here for larger version).

Graph A charts first edition Australian novels throughout the world for the twentieth century, using the place of publication as a co-ordinate of textual production.  From this, trends now familiar to Australian book historians can be observed and confirmed. These include: that up to the Second World War, British (English) publishers for the most part were the majority publishers of Australian novels.  This was not without some local Australian support. Henry Lawson, integral to getting Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career published by Blackwood in London, was to remark in the Sydney Bulletin, 1899: “My advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised, would be to go steerage, stow away, swim, and seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuctoo — rather than stay in Australia till his genius turned to gall, or beer” (Barnes 2007). The alternative for the Australian writer, Lawson offered, was to shoot oneself.

Continuing: That the local industry surged ahead during the Second World War as international conditions of trade deteriorated. According to the Australian Printers’ Trade Journal, “British publishers [based in Australia], affected by paper shortages, began to print in Australia books that formerly they would have exported here …. Local manufacturers began to produce comics by scores of thousands, and to take over the printing … for firms who had formerly relied on overseas production.” (Hagan 1966);

Continuing: That British publishers regained a strengthened position in Australia after the Second World War, to an extent that George Ferguson of Angus & Robertson was to remark that “our intellectual life is the property of a group of British publishers” (Cresp 1977).  There was general consensus that Australian publishing was stifled by being excluded from the international scene. These conditions continued until the USA ruling against the British Publishers Traditional Markets Agreement led to its formal ending in Australia on 31 March 1976.

Continuing: That, contrary to other genres, popular fiction publishers like Horwitz and Cleveland surged ahead to meet a local demand, with production peaking in 1960.  This local demand was due to Australian Customs (Import Licensing) Regulations initiated in 1939 that in practice assessed trade with the USA in the same category as (then enemy) Japan.  That is, due to a currency crisis in Sterling, only essential items which could not be sourced anywhere else internationally were permitted to be imported from a Dollar nation like the USA  – this included popular fiction, which remained a scheduled “adm” item subject to severe restrictions as “non-essential”.  Though there had been a moral crusade since the 1930s which objected to the importation into Australia of texts that “normally-decent people in America would themselves condemn as being a travesty of American ideas and culture” (Cultural Defence Committee, 1935), the Australian readers’ demand for this popular detective / crime / western genre did not dissipate.  As war economy-based paper quotas in Australia were lifted in 1946 and import restrictions with the USA continued until 1959, companies like Horwitz and Cleveland were able to provide for this market domestically.  Though I detail this further in the PhD, it seems to me that this stands today as a primary case study which demonstrates the significant changes in local fiction publishing that can accrue to changes in the nation’s import scaffolding.

Finally, during the 1970s, Australian publishing of novels in general began to gain permanent ground.  While towards the end of the century it is apparent that editions of many Australian novels are still first produced in the UK, USA and elsewhere, the majority of Australian fiction writers place their works at home.  Though the twentieth century for the local book trade began as one dominated by British publishers, it ended clearly belonging to the Australian publisher.

Stacked Area Graph B: Number of manifestations (that is, reprints and foreign editions of novels authored by Australian writers) published in Australia, England, the United States of America, China and Other (comprising Europe, Africa, etc), 1900-2000 (Click here for larger version).

Graph B charts manifestations (reprint and / or foreign editions) of Australian novels throughout the world for the twentieth century, again using the place of publication as a co-ordinate of textual production. From this, two things are apparent. One, that the growth in rights trading closely parallels the growth in Graph A of first editions. Though I cannot empirically prove it at this stage, one interpretation is that the international rights trade in Australian novels is closely linked in with the viability of the local trade. The increases in indigenous productive capacity, with the related increases in the ability to accept and place more titles – what Michael Zifcak identifies in Australia as the “transformation from a major English-language market to a major English-language publishing country” (Zifcak 1990) – parallels increases in foreign editions, translations and editions in other English-speaking countries.

This brings me to my main point: contrary to the Productivity Commission’s estimates, there in fact do appear to be a considerable number of overseas editions of Australian novels. To re-frame this in a statistical context, for the period 1900-2000 there were nearly 12000 foreign or other English-speaking editions of Australian novels. In comparison, for 1900-2000, there were just over 10000 novels first published in Australia. In other words, for Australian-authored novels, the “bulk” of overseas editions were on an equal footing with the “bulk” of local editions.

Admittedly, a good deal more analytical work is required as neither of these graphs accounts for the very recent phenomena of simultaneous publication in different countries made possible by multi-national corporations. Additionally, Graph B does not list which novels have more foreign editions than others (though data on this is available).  Nor does Graph B completely delimit its manifestations to those of novels first published in Australia only – it includes for example a small component of manifestations in Europe, the USA, and the like from Australian-authored novels first published in the UK plus the USA, and this skews conclusions slightly.

However, though a preliminary analysis of bibliographic data drawn from the AustLit database, each graph provides an alternative view of the book and overseas rights trade in Australian novels over a broad period of time and Graph B in particular establishes the general existence of overseas editions. In light of the statement by the Productivity Commission that “Australian-authored books do not appear amenable to significant, if any, parallel importation … [E.2]”, such a claim starts to appear unsustainable when considered exclusively in terms of the Australian-authored novel. It becomes a somewhat unsettling statement since the Productivity Commission is seeking to repeal Australia’s parallel importation restrictions and therefore a miscasting of the trade undermines the commission’s credibility to adequately anticipate all the possible negative effects that may dog such a repeal.  This bears thinking for the future of Australian fiction and the structure of the local industry that will continue to support it.

Graph C: Number of first edition novels authored by Australian writers and published in Australia, 1900-2000.  Blue area indicates proportion of novels by first-time Australian writers published for each year (a total 3404 during 1900-2000); remaining area indicates established writers (i.e., first editions of an Australian author’s second or third novel, etc) (Click here for larger version).

Finally, to close on a more positive note, I end with a graph that questions the commonly held belief that publishers in Australia are accepting fewer and fewer first-time Australian writers, gravitating instead towards the publishing of subsequent novels authored by established Australian writers.  In Graph C, if one ignores the heavy-weights of the Australian companies Horwitz and Cleveland – to whom the 1950s and 1960s clearly belong for their incredible output of detective fiction via a small busy band of writers – it is possible to suggest that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, more first novels by first-time Australian writers than ever before were being published in Australia ….

This article by Jason Ensor is published for the first time online under a Creative Commons Licence (Attribution – No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported). Details of the works cited within the article are available on request.  This article draws on three years of independent consecutive data analysis conducted on a “pre-clean” version of the Australian Literature Resource (AustLit) database accessed through the Curtin University of Technology. This data analysis is located within the context of Professor Richard Nile’s CI-1 ARC Discovery grant “Colonial Publishing and Literary Democracy in Australia: An Analysis of the Influence on Australian Literature of British and Australian Publishing”.

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