Books for a pyrrhic burning

The decision last week of the Federal government to reject the recommendations of the Productivity Commission's report on parallel import restrictions re the Australian book industry has been hailed as a victory by many. The description of the decision as a pyrrhic victory on LP would seem to me more accurate.

Some of the arguments as to why PIRs should remain in place are creaky to say the least. The consequences are however much more worrying.

1. "The removal of PIRs will flood the Australian market with cheap imports which will kill the Australian publishing industry"

The failure to investigate this thoroughly raises both a failing in the PC report and within much of the debate that surrounded it. PIRs in and of themselves do not protect Australian publishing. They protect the territorial rights of editions within Australia - including those published in Australia but also editions published and printed overseas. Australian publishing and distribution are not the one and same thing.

Apart from the multinational-owned publisher/distributors and a very small number of independent publishers, most Australian publishers are not involved in the business of importing and distributing books other than their own. They do not derive any income in any way protected by PIRs. A common sentiment from this type of publisher was that the cheaper overseas titles would erode their market share. I struggle with this for two reasons - firstly, this seems to be based on the assumption that one book is replaceable in the customer's hand with any other. Books are not a generic consumer product - we buy a particular book for an infinite set of reasons, but it is not an indiscriminate purchase. And Australian book buyers are particularly attached to Australian content. Very little of which is published by anyone else other than Australian publishers. Secondly, it suggests that buyers are also motivated by price in a predictable manner, i.e that a cheaper edition of an overseas author's book will also lead to loss of market share, (a cheaper overseas book will replace a possible Australian purchase) I cannot disprove nor prove that assumption - neither can those arguing it - we simply cannot predict how a consumer will alter their buying patterns if PIRs were abolished. It is equally possible that a saving of $10 of an new title by say Arundhati Roy will see the book buyer purchase a second Australian published title.

As to the role that PIRs play in supporting the publishing programs of the multinationals, the report did not explore if and how the profits from closed market distribution ensure the continuance of those publishing programs. No commercial publisher will choose to publish any book unless it can be argued that a reasonable assumption of return on investment will occur for that particular title, or that a strategic advantage can be gained (such as fostering a new writer who editorial believe will meet the financial return expectation with subsequent books; nor should the importance of prestige as to a stable of authors be ignored - it helps ensure agents and authors will submit new manuscripts to a publisher seen to be significant). Nor did the PC report offer a thorough analysis of the number of new authors that the publishers benefiting from PIRs are supporting. Some such as Text, Allen & Unwin and Scribe are lights on the hill as regards this, but they are not the major beneficiaries of PIRs in the Australian market by percentage overall, and could I think be better supported by innovative funding regimes.

2. Australian book prices are comparable to overseas prices

'Comparable' covers a multitude of sins. The PC report clearly identified that:

For like editions in 2007-08, Australian prices are estimated, on average, to have exceeded UK prices for like editions by 9 per cent (on an RRP basis) and 18 per cent (on an ASP basis), and US prices (on an RRP basis) by 35 per cent. For 2008-09, the equivalent estimates are 12 per cent (RRP basis), 25 per cent (UK: ASP basis) and 12 per cent (US: RRP basis).

Taking into account the 10% GST, there is still a differential. But it is the 'like editions' that I find particularly interesting. Australian divisions of multinational publishers began a number of years ago to release new fiction titles from overseas authors in paperback in Australia, whilst they would be published in the UK & US as hardbacks only. Specifically Australian editions, though for the most part printed in Asia. (Most Australian authors also have their new releases published in same C format). Such as Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns or A S Byatt's The Children's Book.

Byatt's title retails in Australia for $34.95 as a paperback. It was first released in the UK and the US as a hardback only; and a hardback I had to have. Ordered from an Australian bookshop, it arrived (and it's not your best printing job Clays Ltd of St Ives) at a RRP of $60. Printed on the fly of the jacket is the UK RRP - £18.99. Which converts from sterling to A$33 (ignoring the fact that I could have bought the hardback from The Book Depository for £7.99 converting to A$14.31 with no freight costs to Australia). I wouldn't, perhaps naively, expect to have paid the same for the paperback but it does raise the question of quite what "like edition" actually means. Yes, obviously the words are the same but the binding is quite different. And it is often suggested that Australian booksellers are being privileged by their access to a paperback edition in terms of making international internet-based sales. Whether anyone would order a copy from an Australian bookshop with a RRP of A$34.95 which would convert back to sterling at £19.53 and undoubtedly have to pay freight on top of that remains a mystery.

But it is not frontlist or best sellers that concern me most. It is the pricing differential for academic titles - access to which is a vital part of any country's knowledge economy and culture. These were not included in the analysis of price differentials in the PC report. This is a sector heavily dominated by the multinational publisher/distributors few of whom have editorial offices in Australia for academic publishing (Pearsons Ed, John Wiley, & McGraw Hill being among the exceptions who do - all of whom have large textbook divisions). I had previously made up a list of prices comparing Australian RRPs with The Book Depository which is quite astonishing, but I've since checked against UK RRP. It isn't much prettier (and nor does The Book Depository discount as much as I thought - looks like 10% on average - but the free freight policy is significant)

Essential Halliday - £24.99 converting to A$44.71 Australian RRP $74.95
Language of Evaluation - £19.99 converting to A$35.76 Australian RRP $64
Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education - £20.50 converting to A$36.68
Australian RRP $75
Infant & Toddler Mental Health - £48 converting to A$85.88 Australian RRP $134

There were two issues not explored adequately in the PC report which impact upon why these differentials may occur.

Firstly, the inefficiencies within distribution chains in Australia. Unlike the UK & US, many distributors have their own warehouse and separate inventory. Some distribute only their own imprints; some distribute other imprints apart from their own; some distribute only books and do not publish and some of these do not hold exclusive rights to the Australian market. There have been, apparently, attempts to set up some equivalent to Ingrams here but to no avail. For a market of our size, this is mind bogglingly stupid. I can only gather that it must be rather comfortably profitable with PIRs in place to protect such inefficiency in distribution.

Secondly, the PC report did not explore what impact having divisions of multinational publisher/distributors buying stock from their own parent or sibling companies in an environment with no competiton. Even if a bookshop decided to order stock from a UK or US wholesaler in exasperation at there being no stock kept in the Australian distributor's warehouse and at the Aust RRP they are expected to charge their customer, they would often discover that the book is short discounted - 10% or even nett pricings by the wholesaler ( the terms of which are set by the publisher). By the time a margin, currency conversion and freight is factored in, the book ends up being very close to the Aust RRP. I do not why this should be so. But I would like to know.

Publishers and distributors do not behave in any way differently from any other business desirious of making a profit, and making good a return on shareholders' investments. They will as all businesses do, utilise market conditions and the regulatory environment under which they operate to maximise profit. They will also attempt to influence both the market and governance to maintain and improve business performance. It is however naive to believe that they enter into a debate such as the pricing of knowledge and our cultural writings without that business focus as their primary responsibility.

3. If it aint broke, don't fix it

And given the bouyancy of the Australian book industry, even through the GFC, from most players' perspectives, things are going swimmingly. American visitors express surprise at the health of the independent retail book sector, and equal surprise at our RRPs. But is it healthy? or as healthy as it should be?

Do PIRs really benefit local Australian publishing? The small publishers who are the usual suspects when it comes to publishing both new writers in non-fiction, fiction, poetry and drama would be better supported by a grants program (perhaps funded by part of the GST revenue raised on books) perhaps a program that supports the writer during the research & writing process, funds editorial support and work on the manuscript (surely the most under-valued work in the Aust book industry), even perhaps funds indexing and rights permissions for illos.

As for booksellers, I've been very aware of the continuing disappearance of academic titles from their bookshelves. I gather the general consensus is that academics were early adapters to internet supply of books and have largely disappeared as customers for academic titles. Given the price differentials, this is hardly surprising. This concerns me enormously but even more concerning is the continuing flight of sales to overseas providers. Distributors respond by reducing what they actively carry in their warehouses, with more and more titles on a 4-6 week supply indent basis; customers willing to buy from bookshops give up and go online; and inventory is reduced again in response to a further fall in sales. If the distributor is also owned by the publisher of the title, do they really care? - they're still getting the sale; people aren't buying another book, they're just buying it offshore and the publisher has still sold that particular book.

This has three consequences for booksellers - they appear to the average customer to be merrily price gouging, generating illwill. And the quality of bookshop stock is falling as the custom for those books is being withdrawn. They will be incredibly hard to win back. It also will mean that bookshops will become more homogeneous as the range of readily available sale or return stock shrinks. I suspect it will be the large affairs such as Borders who will struggle most - they are already reducing inventory following their buyout and Dymocks enthusiasm for the abolition of PIRs is their self-interested recognition that a diverse stock holding is increasingly difficult to finance. If Australian bookshops become less interesting and less visitored, the exposure for Australian published titles that authors and publishers so eagerly pursue has been diminished. Whatever dreams publishers may have about the internet giving them unmediated access to customers, bookshops with a faceout of their new releases still remains the best marketing exposure they can achieve. Particularly if you'd like to engage with the cultural elites.

It will also stymie innovation in both distribution and publishing. Lightning Source have been considering setting up here in 2010 - given a steady as she goes regulatory environment, few publishers will see the point in investing in new processes and models such as POD for overseas published books, which would have generated work for Aust printers, reduced the carbon footprint arising from shipping & air freight, reduced the need for warehousing and its current inefficiencies and finally, lowered the prices of those titles.

No one has any idea how large the purchase of books from offshore providers actually is. Attempting to get GST collected in other jurisdictions wont solve much - look at the price differentials. While the individual customer lives in a global bookshop, their local bookshop is prevented from sourcing imported titles at the best price and delivery time they are willing to pay for. And without a change in regulatory pressures, new technologies such as POD wont provide a possible solution to that inherent inequity. One rationale for the rejection of the recommendations was that Aust book industry requires support while it adjusts to the impact of digital forms. If the astonishingly ill-prepared announcement concerning Titlepage as an ebook delivery platform is anything to go by, it should be about 2055 by the time the industry gets its act together.

The question the government blithely failed to investigate in an evidence-based manner? Are the PIRs the best mechanism for protecting and developing Australian knowledge and cultural economies and Australian writing and publishing culture in general?

I don't think they are.


Addendum 18.11.09: If by chance you think I'm being harsh, Cassandra-like, or have been possessed by Ayn Rand, then don't read this post by Clay Shirky - Local Bookstores, Social Hubs and Mutualization.

Pssstt... wanna buy a book?

One of the stated concerns about the impact of an open market on the Australian book industry is that it will further weaken independent booksellers. A recent blog post by on HuPo by owners of an independent bookstore in the US outlines how dire things are in the States. In comparison, Australia has a far healthier independent bookshop culture, and though personally I'm extremely concerned about the continuing disappearance of academic titles from bookshop shelves, net-based resellers such as Amazon and even Barnes & Noble have not (yet) devastated Australian independent booksellers as US bookstores have been.

US bookstores work with even smaller margins than Australian booksellers which gives them less opportunity to compete with aggressive price cutting by the big players (who are doing a pretty good job of beating each other up at the moment - witness the price stoush between Amazon and Walmart). And it has also been acknowledged that many of the independents in large urban centres in the US had the sense to locate themselves in locales that were ripe for gentrification; post 'urban renewal', the subsequent steep rise in rents has been at least as responsible for businesses failing as falls in turnover.

But the article by Praveen Madan and Christin Evans is by no means all gloom and doom. Their optimism might seem typically American can-do but I'm inclined to agree with them in general if not to quibble over some of the finer points.

While online book resellers can offer an enormous inventory, high discounts, door to door delivery, the Tower of Babelesque enormity of that offering can only work because you as a buyer know what you are after. I strongly suspect a minority of users of online providers make their selections on the basis of what is new and hot or whatever merchandising term the website might use to promote the recent or top selling release. You enter the site having a book or books in mind and begin from there. Perhaps selling strategies such as "what other people bought' works for you; I'm very very interested to know what impact that strategy actually has in terms of additional purchases. Somehow I don't think Amazon will be telling me anytime soon.

Why the success of those additional sales matters is because it is the only user-friendly strategy that the behemoths have developed to provide customers with a moderated selection of book titles that might be of interest to that particular buyer.

To apply a concept from the web, all bookshops and online resellers are ultimately aggregators. The scale of that aggregation obviously is wildly different between a small independent bookshop and Amazon or The Book Depository. But successful aggregation depends upon two key things. That the material being aggregated is of consistent quality and interest to the users, and that the materials are also intelligently moderated. Know thy market; know thy product.

And this is why the type of aggregation practiced by Amazon is reliant on maintaining a vast inventory. Their inability to intelligently moderate their content they attempt to overcome by insinuating that they have everything. (It is also why they have the customer review process - other customers become the de facto moderators of a book; given the rather less than riveting nature of most customer reviews, again I'd love to know how successful this is.) The problem is, you end up on relying on the customer knowing what they want in the first place. This is also why chain stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble are running into problems; carrying inventory to compete with Amazon's promise of instant consumer gratification is expensive and lacks those vital elements of moderation of your aggregating process. In reality, chain stores are far more likely to buy front list titles on the basis of which books offer better margins and previous sales on authors. A not particularly intelligent form of moderation.

Which is where independent bookshops if canny enough have a great and glorious future. Aggregators yes, but highly moderated and intelligent aggregators if done well. In an information world whose vast oceans of data, and bytes and published materials are ever expanding, the user response to intelligent aggregators are already plain to see. And the failure of earlier models of aggregation to evolve as new technologies bring competitors into play is also plain to see in the decline and fall of newspapers.

One of the best bookshops I ever had the pleasure of visiting began as a small post-retirement occupation for two women in Maitland. It was small, and the books they sold were eclectic but highly moderated. Their stock purchases were based on their own very personal preferences. As they sold, they responded to their customers suggestions for additional titles. Had I lived closer, that bookshop would have bankrupted me. No dumpbins of best-sellers, no fear in explaining politely to customers that they didn't carry a particular book (but would order it), and yes it grew like topsy and consumed the two women's retirement.

Many Australian independent bookshops already have strong connections with local literary programs, schools, reading groups and the like. Aggregators for their local communities. What often seems to be missing is quite enough rigorous and intelligent moderation of the books. If we were to move to an open market, and with access to new printing and supply technologies such as Lightning Source, rather than doom, smart independent booksellers should be able to posit themselves as on the ground and responsive aggregators. Minimising their inventory, while vigorously moderating their selection in response to their clients. The blooming of a thousand flowers.

If I were an independent bookseller, I'd have two mantras pinned above the somewhat grubby sink in the back of shop kitchenette:

Think global - act local

Know thy market - know thy product

Web based strategies matter but they should be driven by the intelligence gathered from your customers face to face; a website should reflect what the shop does. Websites are never a matter of 'Build it and they will come". They should be for independent booksellers an adjunct to their retail spaces. Acting as a highly selective aggregator, a website offers a brilliant opportunity to showcase the skill and knowledge that supports the process of aggregation. They also should offer the ability to order titles they may not stock, but this is an additional service, not a replacement for intelligent moderation of stock selection. Combine this with use of social media, and a focus on gathering intelligence from your customers. And into all of this also slides the ebook. It should be viewed as simply another edition of the book, not the town crier wailing "Bring out your dead".

Oh and great coffee. Don't forget the coffee. But no teabags OK?

more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/praveen-madan/evolve-or-die-why-reinven_b_337322.html

Climate change and the forgotten problem

Yesterday I went to the 350 event/rally on the front lawns of Parliament House in Canberra. The events held around the globe have two purposes. One is to provide a straightforward aim to set before ourselves and our political elites in our response to climate change. Secondly, it is to tell our political elites that their feeble responses to climate change are not enough, and they must respond with urgency and a clear focus on what the science is telling us, at Copenhagen.

Climate change is an extraordinarily complex problem. And within that complexity charlatans and deniers weave their reality-free myths. What setting 350 ppm of CO2 does is focus on the impact of human activity upon climate, and provides some clarity as to how we need to act. What we need to do. Now.

The event was small, disappointingly small. It would have been more disappointing had it not been held at all.

As at many other events, a scientist involved in climate related research spoke. And as so many of his peers are telling us, the need for action is urgent, critical. Perhaps so not as to frighten us into inaction, he downplayed the cataclysm we are steamrolling toward. Then Rod Quantock spoke, and asked a very serious question of us. How do we act in the face of the complete failure of our political elites to respond to this? And given the ridiculous dancing at the edges efforts such as carbon trading and the banning of incandescent light bulbs, should we expect anything more of them? No.

Climate change will visit the most appalling impact upon our ecosystems and our societies. The 30% reduction in Europe's population during the fourteenth century when swept by the Black Death will pale in the face of what may come. Agriculture will collapse, inundation of coastal areas will see climate change refugees, and civil society as we know it will not function. How the elites think they will be spared or escape this is beyond me. We are all sitting in the same boat, and the storm will chose who might survive.

And survive into what? A dry dusty planet, ravaged by monstrous weather events. The planet has been there before. The problem for humans is that we have not. Agriculture and the rise of urbanisation and specialisation in human activities is a very recent invention of our species. 10 000 years ago, the climate changed and began to warm; glaciers retreated, and vast forests expanded across the warming landscape. There is evidence that human activity had some role to play in this; but the speed at which we have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere and waters in the last 500 years is only rivaled by events that sparked mass extinctions in earth's past history. The planet probably will be able to regain climatic homeostasis after thousands of years. It is highly unlikely that our species will have survived to see that.

It isn't now a matter of moderating, playing at the edges, lessening our impact upon the planetary systems so that we may continue on with our human societies as we know them. We are now staring at a rapidly reducing likelyhood of mere survival. It isn't about replacing light bulbs with compact fluoros - not when the Victorian state government will commission a new coal-fired power station whose carbon outputs will annul all the gains from those well meaning citizen bulb replacements and much more besides. It requires us to change what we do, how we do it and who we are.

In a recent item on the ABC, Julien Cribb of UTS was quoted as saying in his keynote address to a conference of food productivity experts this week that:

Basically what the world has not noticed is that hunger has been sneaking up on us for quite a while," he told ABC News Online.

"Population is growing and demand for food is rising.

"Governments have had it so good for so long - the world has had plenty of food - they have become complacent and ignorant.

"Climate change is going to get worse and worse, but the food problems are going to be in the next two to three decades.

"I'm warning now because it takes about a generation to develop new technologies and get them out broadscale. We need to take action now about these things."

He also spoke about mass migrations of refugees from Asia as their food production systems collapse in the face of water shortages and rising temperatures, and the extra pressure those numbers will place upon Australia. (The 'problem' of famine refugees always puzzles me - in my life time, victims of famine seem to have rarely mass migrated; they obligingly die in their own villages and towns, presumably too weak to walk out of the Oxfam photos and into our streets.) But is not just his flippant disregard of the millions who have died of starvation in the last 60 years, or the estimated 30% of the Indian population who are currently under-nourished, it is something else that goes to the heart of how futile expecting our political elites to respond to his concerns or climate change will continue to be.

Missing from Cribb's remarks is this: he states that " the world has had plenty of food". And so it might. But people have still starved and we have wrung our hands in concern at their swollen bellies, their pitifully crying babies, the generations of famine survivors with mental and physical consequences of starvation. The granaries were full, the butter mountain got bigger and people still starved. Because missing is the social, ethical and political commitment to equality and justice in our societies that might require the privileged to moderate their greed.

Business as usual means profit, excess, waste, consumption, hierarchy, power. Our current rate of consumption of resources, including those producing greenhouse gases is obscene; particularly as 80% of the world's population does not enjoy the benefits of earth rape as we the other 20% do. No gadgets, no international travel, in fact a resident of a periferia in Sao Paulo would not be sure of where they will sleep that night, no shower, no change of clothes and three meals in a single day? No. Only the rich could dream of that.

Leaders will gather in Copenhagen, spin fine words, promise to save us, but from what? Our demands for equality? For political and economic philosophies and systems that value all equally? That engage with the ecological & life sciences so we may find ways to live with the climatic patterns of Earth? Do you think this is what they will do? No. To begin to see what we reap from the earth as harvest and not as spoils, it will not be our political and economic elites who lead this change. It will have to be us. Equality, justice, communality. Real and actual equality, justice and communality.

What are you doing on Saturday?

Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow will be Thursday, then Friday, then International Day of Climate Action!!

Go to the 350.org Australian website to find out what will be on near you.

So what will you be doing on Saturday?

Pricing Knowledge

Quite what the Federal government will finally decide regarding the Productivity Commission's recommendations into the Australian book industry is yet to be clear, though indications are that Senator Carr does not support the report's recommendations.

The main purpose of the report was to establish whether or not the current import restrictions lead to Australia having higher book prices. The methodology of the research is covered in Appendix D: Price Comparison Methodologies. I'll resist the temptation to murmur about lies and damn lies and statistics but here are the words from the report itself:

For like editions in 2007-08, Australian prices are estimated, on average, to have exceeded UK prices for like editions by 9 per cent (on an RRP basis) and 18 per cent (on an ASP basis), and US prices (on an RRP basis) by 35 per cent. For 2008-09, the equivalent estimates are 12 per cent RRP basis), 25 per cent (UK: ASP basis) and 12 per cent (US: RRP basis).

The surveys used to reach these findings were very focused on best sellers and while they may account for about 40% of retail sales in Australia, it overlooks books that I personally think are much more important, and which the rest of Australian knowledge economies probably would too: academic titles. Given high prices restrict access to knowledge, not only do individuals buy less of those titles described as academic, but so apparently are university libraries, after experiencing years of, let us coyly say, fiscal restraint .

Curious as to what difference really did exist between Australian retail prices and overseas booksellers, I ran through a random group of academic titles. This is specifically a comparison of the listed recommended retail price from an independent Australian bookshop and The Book Depository in the UK. I have no idea how The Book Depository comes to set its selling prices; only a couple of the books indicated they were specifically discounted, so I assume these are generally the retail price.

And so it is quite clearly an uneven comparison - comparing the RRP against a behemoth of on-line book selling. However, the grim reality is that I the individual consumer am not making theoretical comparisons between RRPs when I buy a book; I am looking at what it will cost me, including postage. And TBP does not charge freight. I've left out the exchange charges my bank will impose for each overseas purchase but as it averages at about $8, it would be an insignificant part of any purchasing decision I would make.

Just a note as to the list below - authors in bold are Australian based, though published by overseas publishers; whilst titles in red are Australian published (though not necessarily printed).

Now as I can't for the life of me get a table to load correctly - the html sends Blogger into a complete snit - the list is now a PDF over here.

I was shocked by the price differential. I really didn't expect it to be so significant. Which would go a long to explaining why so few bookshops, including campus bookshops, carry an extensive range of academic titles any longer. Who would buy them? Except those few who haven't yet heard about that internet thingie.

And that is a problem - if I can't wander into a bookshop, flip through the contents & bibliography, snort over the referencing, how do I assess the book? How do I stumble across titles that I simply would not have known about using the search perimeters utilised by online suppliers? 'People who Bought this'.. doesn't quite cut the mustard when it comes to academic titles.

I haven't got time to browse each publisher's website; the cataloguing of books by online sellers is curious to say the least; quite how you are meant to find out about new titles when it is apparent that no right minded bookseller in Australia would bother stocking them given our RRPs worries me. And I know booksellers aren't indulging in price gouging - the few bookshops who do carry these sort of books are usually independents and their margin from distributors mean that they have to sell at the RRP to break even.

Various alternatives to the major publishing houses are emerging, including open source and POD using say Scribd or even Lulu. But again, how do you find out about these titles? Be lucky enough to be on someone's email list? Tripping over it online while wading through a search result? How do libraries find out about them and then order them in these days of centralised buying? And will they count toward those all important publish or be damned scorecards academics have to complete these days? Probably not. And we haven't even considered whether such publishing models utilise high quality editing, indexing, proof reading.....

But perhaps my hand wringing is all very old fashioned. The dawn of the ebook reader would finally seem to be upon us, and I can't imagine any publisher will resist the temptation to forgo a printed edition for the no printing, no warehousing, no shipping alternative of an ebook. Which is another reason why the book industry's cry of "leave it all - it aint broke" seems so, well, irrelevant. Consumers now operate in a global economy where the interface is their keyboard, and the physical necessity of a printed book is no longer so necessary. But I can't help frowning and wondering quite what all this will mean, what are we losing. Digital formats are brilliant at disseminating information; its just the knowledge bit I'm not so sure of.

Newsprint Gates

Saturday's Spectrum ran a piece by Nick Galvin , The Death of a gatekeeper. It is another article in the endless stream of gazing into the pool of mainstream media and the impact that the net, and particularly Web 2.0, is having upon newspapers and other media forms.

It says little that hasn't been said before, evokes Andrew Keen's concerns about the dumbing down, the impact of the amateur and ends with:

It is indeed a nice idea that this unprecedented social and cultural experiment may turn out to be more evolution than revolution, but that may be all it is - a nice idea. On the available evidence, the power and fury unleashed by the internet is not big on compromise, nor is it easy to predict where it will head next. We should be careful what we wish for.

Galvin does raise some of the issues about accuracy, editorial and writing standard that may at times be lacking, but his grave warning speaks more to the redundancy of mainstream media than critical problems with Web 2.0 content.

Newspaper readership numbers are falling in just about every major centre across the globe, which Galvin graphically illustrates with the demise of the Tuscon Citizen, Arizona's oldest paper which closed on May 16th of this year. 65 staff lost their jobs on a paper whose circulation had shrunk from 60 000 at its peak to 17 000. But why? This is what I find so frustrating about the newspaper industry's response to this issue. Why did the Tuscon Citizen lose its readers? Has every single one of those 43 000 or so no longer reading it tuned into Web 2.0? Have other media forms had an impact? Where is the analysis of local TV stations and radio coverage? Have other advertising and marketing platforms established themselves in the area?

This lack of rigour, this lack of basic fact finding appears again and again in articles lamenting the drop in readership, and the consequent reduction of staff and services as the papers' owners scramble to maintain some profitability. Criticising the pundits of Web 2.0 for their sloppy standards, so much of this hand wringing fails to do that which it accuses its new enemies of doing.

Some reasons for the fall in readership are straightforward. Online news services offer real time news - newspapers are now the equivalent of the mail boat from Plymouth arriving 34 days later in Fremantle. Net access provides news sites, aggregators, or real time radio & TV. Which theoretically should also accommodate print based journalism on the paper's own website. But a printed hard copy of any paper has come to sit somewhere out of the new 24/7 news cycle - neither informant nor seer.

The loss of advertising revenue is also significant. New advertising platforms, some themselves now redundant (The Trading Post published its last hard copy version last week and is now entirely web based) have been siphoning away this revenue stream for years. As newspaper proprietors rather like making money, cutting back on quality journalism may please the accountants but would seem to remove one of the few reasons why you would bother buying a paper filled with news that may be 48 hours old.

But in order to understand what is happening and what ought to be done as a consequence requires something more than another article moaning about the horrors of unmoderated content bubbling from the Fount of Web 2.0.

Who is reading papers? What are their demographics? Why are they reading them? Some of this is known - persons under 30 tend to view newspapers with something akin to my 12 year old watching an LP revolving on a turntable. Baffling and pointless. The readership is aging, and people have a most unfortunate habit of dying as they age. Not something to build one's circulation upon. Given this most simple of facts, the decision by both Fairfax and News Ltd not to take up the use of Amazon's Kindle device as a new distribution model for their papers is frankly idiotic. Stupid. And completely missing the point.

The resistance and antipathy to news aggregators is also stupid. Presence is the first necessity and failing to engage will only allow some brash upstart the space to explore and grow. But I am most curious to know if the elites still need the papers in quite the same way as they once did. And even more curious to know how those elites are responding to a highly fractured media environment where influence, connection and control of a limited number of players in print, radio and TV is no longer possible.

Just after the British Labour Party annual shindig, The Sun announced it would be supporting the Conservatives in the next general election in Britain. Once upon a time, this would have been immensely important. Brown shrugged it off as embattled leaders usually do, but his response may be a more accurate reflection of the paper's influence than its' owner would like.

Over the last 24 months, The Sydney Morning Herald has run numerous campaigns with something of the tone of an indignant early morning TV host. Exposing the shonky disabled parking permit system, the appalling state of NSW public transport, public health, roads and tolls designed presumably by Keen's monkeys, Ministers with more fingers in more pies - the list goes on and on. But the result of all this increasingly shrill exposure and criticism has been... zip. Not one single Minister in the NSW government has been stood aside or down as a consequence of an SMH expose. Nothing has changed, no one has been called to account. The wagon that is the ALP in NSW continues to sway and bounce unerringly toward the precipice of the next election. The print version of the Fourth Estate has more impact upon the citizens of Sydney by virtue of the racing pages than anything on Page 1. It is not that Labor is teflon coated; the Herald has become irrelevant.

And as much as this is a problem for Fairfax, it is also a problem for the our ruling elites. With fractured audiences, selling message has got a lot lot harder. Australia is still mainstream media-centric, though the greatest influence would appear to lie now with TV. The prospect of Barnaby Joyce and Wilson Tuckey appearing on Red Faces is not such a long walk from Rudd and Hockey on Sunrise. What is a newspaper to do? It would be comforting to at least see that they had some understanding of emerging delivery platforms. It would be expected that they also understood the importance of supporting investigative journalism that broke the news instead of merely dawdling along behind the Web 2.0 cycle by some hours. It should also be assumed that they carry comment well researched and well written instead of much of the laughable nonsense that fills column inch after inch.

Galvin is ambivalent about the demise of the gatekeepers. If the current state of decision making by editors, owners and boards of management are anything to go by, we can assume they shall continue to be baffled as to the horses having bolted, the gate swinging forlornly on its rusting hinge.

An app a day keeps the punters away

Just when we thought there was nothing at all amusing about the NSW state government, relief came in a piece in today's Crikey.

"NSW Premier Nathan Rees this morning reinforced the state’s commitment to “open government” with the apps4nsw program — a public competition with prizes of $100,000 for the development of innovative digital applications and web services using public and government data.

Entries may be websites or web based services, mobile applications or stand-alone PC based or kiosk-based applications.

“The prizes will be judged by an expert panel — which doesn’t include me — and there will also be a People’s Choice Award and the opportunity for the best entry to go to a prototyping phase”, said Rees.

“Anything we develop as a result of the competition will be licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. These will be public apps for the common good.”

I checked the date, no, it's September not April. However being suspicious by nature, off I pottered to the ever-helpful NSW.gov.au website.

And it is true.

So I'd like to put up a prize too - haven't worked out what yet, perhaps a unique hand-crafted Banksia man rear-vision mirror ornament, but it's not winning that matters (as NSW Labor will soon discover) but trying. Of which they certainly have a lot of practice. Trying.

So the competition is this: come up with an idea for an app which would allow we the people to gain information about a government service in NSW. Yes there was that clever fellow who ran up a little Iphone app about train timetables but as that's classified information that even CityRail doesn't seem to have access to, perhaps it's best to stick with something a little less practical. Here's a few helpful examples:

> Lurgyapp - login to find out where your local hospital ranks in its reportage of average wait in Emergency!

> LandDevapp - Want to build a vast new sub-division without adequate infrastructure or even outside local planning guidelines? Pop over to LandDevapp to find out which local government area has the most helpful sitting member of State Parliament! (Currently only applies to ALP held electorates)

> Complain-a-lotapp - Want to send a quick message to your local member about the overflowing toilet on this morning's train trip? Complain-a-lotapp lets you make sure your parliamentary representative knows too! And each complaint will receive a personalised response from the member's electoral office.

>CommuteHootapp - Bored sitting on a bus? Stuck in traffic on the M5? Play CommuteHootapp to idle away those hours. Try and plan a trip by bus, rail or ferry along seven routes across metropolitan Sydney - beat the nine hour limit and you could win a job in senior management at CityRail!

> Airqualapp - Check out Sydney's Air Quality Warnings without winding down the car window! Click on your location on the map to find out if its sneeze, choke or bleed!

At Bernice App Central, we're ready to pass your suggestions on to the NSW Government. Because we know there's always someone listening. So hop to it, and that Banksia Man Rear-vision Mirror Ornament could be yours!