Dialogue: Government loses plot on books

A new import ban is illogical, says Whitcoulls national sales manager JOAN MACKENZIE*.

The parallel import debate is again rearing its head as the Labour-led Government seeks to protect our creative industries.

It proposes reintroducing a ban of up to two years on the parallel importing of books, CDs, videos and software. The Government's objective is laudable, but reintroducing such a ban won't help it achieve its goal.

That kind of protectionism would mean higher book prices and poorer availability. It would be bad news not just for those who voted Labour, but for everybody who likes to read.

The beneficiaries would be the overseas owners of the big publishing houses in New Zealand, not the local creative sector.

Publishing is, by nature, a monopolistic business. A publisher owns the rights to publish, sell and distribute an author's works in certain territories.

That work would, under the proposed ban, be made available here through just one company.

It would not be like buying a new dishwasher, where there was a choice of brands and suppliers. If you wanted John Grisham or Wilbur Smith, you would have to use the single, legitimate, source of supply.

Potentially, this would have an effect on our supply chain which, in Whitcoulls' view, would be detrimental to the interests of customers and readers.

In a monopoly situation, the publisher determines the timing of publication, the recommended retail price and the retailers' margins. There is no possibility of competition or any incentive for it to raise its game.

Before the original ban was lifted, books were commonly published here several months after their overseas release.

When trying to source special orders for our customers, it was common for us to have to wait up to 12 weeks or even longer.

Publishing is, at best, an extraordinarily inefficient business. It must be, because even under the present regime our supply chain is often unresponsive, uninterested and out of stock.

God knows how it would be if the clock were wound back.

What parallel importing has done is ensure that new titles are available shortly after publication, at prices that are attractive enough to stop either retailers or individuals looking beyond the local suppliers.

It must be recognised that it is not cheap to import books. Exchange rates and freight charges can make overseas buying prohibitively expensive.

We recently bought the latest Oprah title from Amazon to get an early indication of its potential here. The book, which is likely to sell here for $29.95, cost us $53.

This in itself should be a comfort to the local suppliers, who in many cases retain our business by default.

Whitcoulls has been actively parallel importing for the past 18 months, bringing in thousands of titles.

The books we import in this way are not new titles but end-of-line and remainder books, surplus to overseas requirements.

During this time we have seen, or been offered, a New Zealand title only two or three times.

In the overall scheme of things, reintroduction of the ban would be a very blunt instrument to protect against a negligible risk.

Our customers, on the other hand, clearly support what we do. In one week we recently sold 11,500 books through four shops, all of which were parallel-imported titles being offered for sale at reasonable, accessible, prices. It is hard to argue that this is not a good thing.

When the ban was removed, some predicted the change would be the death knell of the local publishing industry.

Yet, according to Book Data New Zealand, there was a 23 per cent increase in the number of New Zealand books published between 1997 and 1999.

The Government apparently hopes that a ban would support our local writing and publishing community, through a channelling of local profits back into the local publishing divisions of the multinationals. This is a philanthropic view at best.

In these days of profit pressures, it seems unlikely that profits made by the New Zealand operation would be absorbed into the international accounts faster than you can turn a page.

Potentially, if prices are raised in a non-competitive environment, it will cost people more to read the books they want to read, in order that small indigenous businesses can be propped up.

In a global marketplace it would surely be a nonsense if there were one law for companies, and another for individuals.

Whitcoulls would be legally prohibited from deciding what, at any given time, constituted its best source of supply, and be confined to getting its stock through local nominated publishers.

Given that anyone can go home and use the internet to order whatever they want, from anywhere in the world, where is the logic in that?