Book publishers

16 November 2012 

The Executive Director
Australian Law Reform Commission
GPO Box 3708
SYDNEY NSW 2001
E-mail: info@alrc.gov.au 

Dear Sir/Madam

Re: Issues Paper Copyright and the digital economy (ALRC IP 42)

Allen & Unwin is Australia’s largest independent book publisher. We publish 250 new titles every year, including fiction, general non-fiction, children’s books and books for the academic market. The majority of our books are written by Australian authors and our primary market is Australia. We first started publishing ebooks in 2005, and now routinely issue new titles in ebook edition. We are constantly expanding local and international partnerships for distributing our ebooks and investing in new formats.

Strong copyright laws which support the creation and circulation of Australian content in both print and digital formats are the basis of the Australian book industry and of Allen & Unwin’s business. We believe current Australian copyright law offers a fair balance between the needs of creators and users, including the fair dealing exceptions. While we acknowledge that it’s worth reviewing the Australian Copyright Act in the light of developments in digital publishing, we do not believe that significant change is required at present.

Both internationally and in Australia, the book industry is at the early stages of a substantial upheaval and restructuring driven by digital technologies. Like many other Australian book publishers, Allen & Unwin expects to continue to invest heavily in online delivery of books in print and ebook formats, in the creation of ebooks, and in digital systems to improve our operations. However we believe it is still far too early for anyone to be able to predict how digital change will shape publishing in even five years time, let alone in the medium term. We therefore urge caution in changing the Copyright Act. At present the digital market is volatile and new and old players are jostling to determine new ways to do business. Digital developments often come from left field. As we know only too well from our experience to date with digital publishing agreements, there can be serious unintended consequences of well-intentioned and apparently minor concessions. 

In particular, Allen & Unwin supports the current educational provisions in Part VB of the Copyright Act. We believe these are working well as administered by Copyright Agency to reimburse authors and publishers to some degree for the voluminous print and digital copying of copyright materials undertaken in schools, universities and other educational institutions. Income we receive from educational copying assists us in continuing to publish for the academic market. However we recommend that the educational provisions be extended to cover digital and interactive materials published as part of, or as a supplement to, a published work.

We have concerns about current library copying and digital distribution of copyright materials, and we would argue against any extension of library copying. Australian libraries already make considerable use of digital technology to extend inter-library loans and the copying of published materials for patron research purposes well beyond what was originally intended when these practices were established in the analogue era. We note that where libraries copy published works currently, they frequently create files without any digital security and  send them to patrons as email attachments. Such files are all too easily forwarded on to others and may end up on filesharing websites (requiring library patrons to warrant the file is for personal use is no real protection with a digital file). University libraries also make digital copies available to large numbers of student users across multiple campuses. As no further payment for this copying is made, these practices already undermine normal commercial trading in published content.

We emphasise that libraries should be obliged to properly research whether a work is commercially available before copying a print original, and note that in the Hathi Trust case in the US a respected academic library has shown itself woefully irresponsible in conducting research of this kind for ‘orphan’ works. Like many Australian publishers, in the past couple of years Allen & Unwin has been reissuing long out of print Australian books and we cannot maintain such investments if they are routinely undermined by library copying.

We are also concerned that any introduction of digital copying for print-disabled library patrons could be all too easily abused by overly generous interpretations of disability at library level. We argue that the recent explosion in commercial availability of ebooks and multiple reading devices, including those with synthetic audio features (eg: Text to Speech function on Kindle) should cover the needs of the vast majority of print-disabled readers.

Should the ALRC recommend extending legal deposit provisions to ebooks, we urge that this be purely for the purposes of an archival function, and that any use of the ebook files even within the physical premises of a state library be strictly limited, in such a way that copying by the user is not technically possible. We would also strongly request that any such provision limit the burden on publishers for file provision. For example, it would be fair to only require publishers to submit ebook files which are substantially different in content from the regular print edition of the work which the publisher is already required to supply under legal deposit. The majority of ebooks published at present are in fact identical in content to the print edition, and there is frequently no material difference in the content as it appears in one or other ebook file format.

Allen & Unwin is constantly adapting its business to fit the developing digital era, and we will only be able to maintain our investment in high quality Australian authored books and in the local market if we are supported by strong copyright law. We trust the ALRC will take this into account in its review of the Copyright Act. 

Yours sincerely

Elizabeth Weiss
Academic and Digital Publishing Director
eweiss@allenandunwin.com
ph 02 8425 0107 (direct)