Local writing does need some support but it can come from things like Premier’s Prizes and from public and school libraries - libraries look out for any local books that have attracted good reviews and library buying can amount to hundreds and hundreds of sales, which is a pretty good start.

He seems to expect the latest Australian kid writer from Toowoomba to compete with decidedly unlocal writers like Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe, (etc, etc), or, on a lower level, the Dan Browns and Harold Robbins of the international scene. That’s just rubbish. Where a writer is born shouldn’t matter, but the quality of their writing does - the readers of Australia know this, and Government should stay well away from any attempts to direct the reading decisions of Australians.

Part of the overseas shipment that went astray was the Australian Kylie Kwong’s My China: A Feast for All the Senses (Hardcover). In my local bookshop its au$80+ . At Amazon it is ~$32. Postage here would have cost me another $12 or more plus packaging. Amazon posts and packages for about $10.

Maybe Kwong doesn’t qualify as an Australian author if we are talking fiction. I find it hard to see how she was disadvantaged by my buying in USA as I wouldn’t have purchased the book at au$80 here anyway.

With Amazon, even before the dollar was about equal, the convenience, cost and quick service was impressive. I can hear about a book, order it at midnight friday and 90% of the time it will land on my doorstep (and I mean literally on my doorstep - so I don’t have to drive or walk to the post office) by the next friday.

The 10% GST would not make enough difference on any of my purchases to worry about it.

A month or so back I was able to pre-order the latest James Lee Burke novel. It will arrive, in hardback, around 3 months before it is available in Australia. It will arrive on my doorstep cheaper including postage, and 3 months quicker than I can buy the paperback in Oz. My local bookshops just cannot offer anything remotely like this. ( the local bookshops seem to be technophobes - they don’t even seem to have data bases of purchases or email notices or any online presence.)

I also send books as presents from Amazon to relatives overseas - direct from Amazon. I had a $250 order to overseas go astray somehow. Amazon replaced the $ in my credit card after 2 months. No hassle, no accusations of me being dodgy. Naturally I re-ordered the books - this time they arrrived 4 weeks later. Every one happy.

I order lots of stuff from overseas bike parts, bike clothes etc.

You can buy stuff from overseas, add postage and foreign currency conversion charges, and the prices you pay are still less than the wholesale prices of stores. It’s crazy.

No , it’s not crazy. It’s actually quite rational expected behavior from human beings. My wife has been buying most of her clothes off the web overseas and receives a ” double discount” when she’s buying at the end of the northern season discounts.

funny, how markets work, hey?

I’m not (obviously) against Australian books. But their publication should not be propped up by denying Australian readers quick access to books published elsewhere.

And what a disgusting scam it was too. One of the first things I experienced living in the US was just how cheap books were over there at the time… more than 1/2 for the most part.

Perhaps these days the main losers from this arrangement are booksellers, as many book readers just go straight to Amazon or other online booksellers.

Those that don’t specialize or have their wits about them deserve to go under. There are plenty of books stores I see that seem to be doing well. Those that a close to coffee shops that promote impulsive buys. There are aso books stores that seem to specialize in those sorts of books that are harder to buy on line as you want to see them.

I would bet that on a per cap basis there are far more books being sold now in Australia than there before. The writers and books stores simply need to know how to compete.

In fact the on line world ought to make it far easier for writers to find bigger markets so I don’t understand what this guy is after other than sticking his hand in the taxpayers pocket to write books nobody wants to read.

For example, I just ordered my textbooks for next semester from Amazon. It works out nearly $100 cheaper than buying it from the co-op bookshop at the university.

Smart publishers and the like should instead be trying to win the local franchise for Amazon. Australia is not a very big market, but big enough to sustain two retail chains and a handful of large publishing houses. Throw in the Kindle (god I want one of those so badly) and you could see a real revival.

And to me this is all just a set of symptoms of statist parasitism. If you depend on the state your imagination is stunted. Everything becomes about what you can suck out of the public tit and defending this or that program. All energy and ingenuity that could have been used to serve customers better.

A book from a foreign publisher should never be ordered from an Australian bookstore.