‘While many jobs in publishing, printing and bookselling have probably been saved (in the short term at least) by the Federal Government’s rejection of the Productivity Commission’s proposal, the pressures that led to the enquiry in the first place have not gone away and are only likely to increase.’
Now that the Productivity Commission’s proposal to abolish parallel import restrictions has been defeated, how about getting the Government to do something that would support Australian booksellers: force overseas online etailers like Amazon to charge GST on books (and other goods?) sold to Australia?
Today, an intense year-long debate about the future of Australia’s publishing industry effectively came to an end with the announcement that the Australian Government had rejected a proposal from its own think-tank to turn Australian into an open market for books.
This is really an argument about bestsellers, profit margin and market power …
