Since the dawn of copyright, publishing empires and their advocates have been boringly consistent in their responses to any changes in copyright law that they choose to disfavour.
They respond every time by simply and simplistically predicting the ruin of the starving creator and the publishing industry, and along with these, the imminent end of Culture, learning and everything nice. Examples are legion. In the publishing empire’s impoverished imagination, with every amendment that has loosened the stranglehold of copyright law, and enlarged the rights of the reading public, the Wheels of Civilization, no less, have ground creakingly to a Final Halt. In over 400 years, this iron template hasn’t altered even marginally, and still continues to plague us to this day with its oppressive banality.
The occasion for this outburst on my part is some of the writing that has surfaced in the ongoing debate over the “parallel import” amendments sought to be introduced into the Copyright Act. For instance, Thomas Abraham’s darkly titled piece “The death of books” in the Hindustan Times which begins bluntly with a prophesy that the new amendment will “dismantle the very fabric of Indian writing in English”. <shudder> There goes my entire library. Thomas then proceeds to issue some misinformation about how the Indian publishing industry “is just about coming into its own in the past few ten years or so”. (As any student of Indian publishing would know, India has been, at least since the late 19th century, home to the most thriving, profitable low-cost print publishing industries anywhere in the world.) Next, with all the freshness of a 400 year old argument, he informs us that because of the new amendment, authors will be bereft of their “economic right.. to profit from their copyright” and consequently will lose all their “incentive” to create. There is the classic, sly conflation of the author’s interest with the big publisher – you are with us or against the struggling author.
There are, however, some novelties in Thomas’ argument. Chiefly the gratuitous disparagement of intellectual production in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, (allegedly these countries cannot claim even a single “literary or commercial author brand” between them!) and the chastisement of India on account of the fact that “mature markets” don’t have analogous provisions on parallel import as we are trying to introduce. In this latter assertion, India is deftly transformed into the errant schoolboy of global lawmaking!
Rumours of the death of books, fortunately, have always been greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately, so have the rumours about the demise of big publishing.
As I have written elsewhere, I owe my education in English entirely to low-cost editions of books bought from pirate street vendors or less-frequently at second hand bookstores (who typically would stock books imported from overseas library sales). So I’m eagerly anticipating the changes this new amendment promises to unleash – more of the same. (Aside, officially sold English books in India have always been much more highly priced than vernacular books of identical print quality – prompting us to speculate who pockets the difference. And why. The interests of the reading public or the author are very far removed in this calculus.)
Contrary to the fantasies of big publishing empires, it is not their own largesse, but the unwitting generosity of small printers and pirates and book importers that is the cause of India being home to such a huge mass of regularly consuming readers in English. Let nobody be fooled. If street piracy and second-hand sales had been killed off twenty years ago in India, the market for English books in India would not have expanded at all. How else does one explain the irony that despite rampant piracy, despite having the laxest copyright regime in the world (by the publisher’s own accounts), despite the most permissive fair dealing regime in the world, the Indian publishing industry today is a global behemoth. In the past few years alone, India has been invited as the “guest of honour” at multiple book fairs including the ones at London, Frankfurt and Beijing – a testament to the robustness of our indigenous industry. Contrast this with the situation in Hong Kong and Singapore who, in addition to not having any “literary or commercial author brands” between them, have also little to no street piracy in books. The other thing they lack is a thriving indigenous publishing industry. Perhaps the three are interrelated.
In big publishers’ completely book-hating utopia, these “remaindered” books would have to languish in disuse or be destroyed – they would gather dust in warehouses or be turned to pulp rather than circulate in the hands of caring readers who would otherwise be denied access to them. I’m sure this is the stuff every author’s dreams are built of. As a bibliophile who treasures every article on his bookshelf, I am astonished by the hatefulness of this vision – which could only have been issued from the pen of a big-publishing-empire advocate. I think it is one of the most painful ironies of our times that the custodians and owners of our most cherished cultural outputs happen to be copyright lawyers and CEOs of big publishing empires – the dullest, most misanthropic people on the planet.
Although this debate on parallel imports is new, it is in some senses as old as copyright itself. As Mark Rose informs us in his seminal article The Author as Proprietor, Copyright Law itself originates as a move against “parallel import” :
In 1694 the Licensing Act, the statute that regulated the British press, had been allowed to lapse because it was apparent that it was operating primarily as a restraint on trade. Most affected negatively were the small group of powerful London booksellers who under the ancient rules of the Stationers’ Company had come to control nearly all the old copyrights of value. This group, whose dominance of the book trade was threatened by the provincial booksellers of Ireland and Scotland (who were not bound by the rules of the Stationers’ Company), petitioned Parliament for permission to bring in a bill to regulate the trade, and in 1709 the Statute of Anne, the world’s first copyright act, was passed.’ The statute was essentially a codification of long-standing practices of the Stationers’ Company, but, whereas under the guild regulations copyright was perpetual, under the statute the term was limited to fourteen years with a possible second term if the author were still living. (emphasis mine)
Then, as now, the issue was about incumbent interests in the heart of Empire – the London Booksellers – trying to preserve their dominions against upstart native enterprise in the colonies (in the 17th century, the Irish, Scots and Indians were regarded, alike, as barbarians – See Henry Maine etc) to the detriment of the reading public.
The proposed amendment will not kill Indian publishing (and even more ridiculously, Indian writing), any more than a century of piracy has. But defeating it *will* preserve the rights of global publishing empires, headquartered overseas, to decide which class of the Indian public gets to consume its books.
At stake are not the interests of “Indian publishing” at large, but the interests of a clutch of foreign publishers who wish to re-colonize Indian publishing and consumption through the devious means of licensing contracts.
Here’s an alternate scenario – my counter-utopia to Thomas’ ungenerous one:
The parallel import clause passes into copyright law, and an entire business model is spawned which focuses on providing access to books through parallel import. Since books tend, almost as a rule, to be much more expensive abroad, it would not make economic sense (there would be no incentive!) to import books where low-priced editions are already published in India. This will force more foreign publishers to aggressively publish low-priced editions in India – thus leading to a further expansion of the Indian publishing industry, and benefiting the Indian reader with access to wider material. Meanwhile importers would concentrate on books where editions are not available in India – opening up access to a hitherto unavailable richness of literature. As more second hand book stores open up, the general levels of readership will increase – leading to the production of more author-aspirants, and a larger consuming public. The new authors will in turn greatly expand the markets for Indian publishing, who will reap more enormous profits (since that’s what it all seems to come down to anyway) from the expanded Indian readership. India will greedily lap up the “remaindered” books of the world – a thought I find absolutely alluring.
And all of this because of parallel imports.
(Ps. I’ve desisted from running through the specific legal provision implicated because I think this has already been done by many others. For a very detailed account of this provision and its various legal intricacies read Pranesh Prakash’s excellent and thoughtful post:Why Parallel Importation of Books Should Be Allowed
I endorse everything there.
Rahul Maththan has added his voice to the debate by endorsing the amendment in his article in the Indian Express. There’s also a piece on SpicyIp by Amlan Mohanty.
As with most things in IP law, I think this battle will be won more in the realm of rhetoric than legal argument.
Just for clarity, I think that buried under the heavy jargon of “parallel import”, “territoriality”, “national exhaustion” etc, this is really a battle being waged by foreign publishers against bibliophiles and bibliophilia in India. The incumbents in the global publishing industry have always been cranky about losing their monopolies and things are no different this time. As usual they’ve dragged the specter of the struggling author to shadow-box for them. Seldom in the history of copyright law have any developments truly been about benefiting the author (for instance, why don’t we have a law that statutorily prescribes a minimum royalty of say 50% of the price of the book? Wouldn’t that benefit the struggling author? Currently, the global average royalty an author receives is rarely over a measly 8-10%.).
PPs: I realize I must sound very unkind to Thomas Abraham in this piece –I don’t know him and I’m sure he’s an honourable man. As any good historian of copyright law will agree, I think his piece rehashes exactly the same arguments that have been made thousands upon thousands of times in the past by captains of big publishing industries. I’m using his piece as a prop, but it is in fact to the same arguments that my post is addressed)
Update +1 day: There’s an interesting rebuttal to my post by Thomas Abraham at Divya Dubey‘s blog. I’m prepared to concede the argument about “English language publishing” in India having some cause to worry. As he acknowledges, this is not the same as “Indian writing in English” – which was my main point. I also found very interesting his assertion that “Any importer would concentrate first on the book that was a success here.” – I think this is true, despite my provocation. But this leads to two conclusions – one that parallel import is an issue that will concern only large publishers and big-name authors. And second, why aren’t these books, these “low cost Indian editions” more accessibly priced to start with? As of this writing, Gyan Prakash’s tome on Bombay/Mumbai costs Rs 600 on Flipkart and is only available in hardback edition. For many of us this is an unacceptable price, and doesn’t give us a lower priced paperback option. The publishing industry’s response – that I should wait for their approved “low priced” edition to emerge a few months/years(?) from now is high-handed. Bibliophilia doesn’t wait, if it can avoid it, for the territorial fantasies of large publishers to play out. I think parallel imports will force Indian publishers to change their business model and there will be a welcome reduction in prices all round. This will benefit consumer choice, expand readership and benefit the author both in royalty payments as well as increased exposure to audiences. One only has to look at how Moser Baer has succeeded in tapping into a large market of cinephiles by dropping the rates of CDs to ‘pirate’ prices – with no drastic consequences for Indian cinema. The Moser Baer’s model was self-consciously modelled after the ‘pirate’ business model and I await a similar readjustment in the realm of English book publishing and distribution. Bibliophilia, like cinephilia, is something that industries can tap into – but it will need a re-imaginative shake up of prevailing industry shibboleths. I think parallel import may provide the occasion for such a shake up – since book piracy has largely failed.
Aside, I’ve decided that I like this Thomas Abraham! I think he’s been very patient, and informative about the industry-as-it-stands. Book publishing in India has operated largely in the shadows and I think between his posts, he’s provided a lot of grist for research. I’ve decided to tone down my jibes in this post where possible. Time to roll back the tanks, lay down the weapons and stop baring fangs! :). I hope we can meet as friends!
The arguments here (as also cited at several other places by other people) have been rebutted in detail.
Please do study the rebuttal very carefully. They also explain many other things. Publishers across the country haven’t been up in arms for no reason.
Link right here:
http://dearddsez.blogspot.com/2011/02/thomas-abrahams-rebuttal-to-why.htm
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Divya Dubey
Publisher
Gyaana Books
Thanks Divya.
I had studied the “rebuttal” carefully before my post, and I don’t believe that it does that – rebut. It equivocates a lot and employs jargon and faulty economics to obfuscate. “Lack of a stable and secure market means original rights holders will also be reluctant to grant reprint rights..” blah blah.
Mature markets. blah.
This isn’t the way real people – either authors or readers live, and that’s the point of my post.
Parallel import is about what happens to books in other countries when the local audience don’t want to read them. Do they get trashed, or do they recirculate in the hope that other countries may have more sympathetic audiences. I believe they should recirculate. I think the hypothetical “risks” to the Indian publishing industry are completely overstated – but hyperbole has been the defining feature of how the publishing industry has shaped copyright law in the last 200 years or more. So nothing new.
For a long time, publishers have pretended and behaved as though copyright exists exclusively to protect their business model. No other industry is similarly pampered. I think it’s time to return focus to authors and readers/consumers – publishers will adapt, as they always have.
The Publishing industry’s biggest concern, cutting through the jargon and equivocation, has been to preserve the sanctity of its holy “business model” which is based on such dated concepts as territoriality, national exhaustion etc. If this amendment leads to the evolution of a new business model that expands the audience of authors and enhances the access of readers, I think that would be a real advance in copyright.
Some questions for Messers Prakash and Prashant from an overworked editor (and forgive me for keeping it simple, and not confusing issues with jargon and legalese):
“Examples are legion. In the publishing empire’s impoverished imagination, with every amendment that has loosened the stranglehold of copyright law, and enlarged the rights of the reading public, the Wheels of Civilization, no less, have ground creakingly to a Final Halt. In over 400 years, this iron template hasn’t altered even marginally, and still continues to plague us to this day with its oppressive banality.”
Q: Poetic and romantic as you sound, could you please illuminate us with these examples that are “legion”? Do you actually mean to say that publishing has thrived around the world without any concern for the people that they publish for? Then by your own free market logic, the industry should have died a death a long time ago. Or did we all sit and conspire to hoodwink our readers by imagining the costs of producing a book and adding a margin of profit to be able to pay bills and work on more books?
“Thomas then proceeds to issue some disinformation about how the Indian publishing industry “is just about coming into its own in the past few ten years or so”. (As any serious student of Indian publishing would know, India has been, at least since the late 19th century, home to the most thriving, profitable low-cost print publishing industries anywhere in the world.)”
Q: Can you please prove otherwise with some “information” from your end? I wonder how you could, when you happily support piracy just a few lines below?
“If street piracy and second-hand sales had been killed off twenty years ago in India, the market for English books in India would not have expanded at all.”
Q: If publishers did not publish, what pray would the pirates pirate? And, who, would pay the bills of the poor author that worked on the manuscript and the editor who worked with her, and the designer who composed the book, had it not been the publisher who put the money in to fund these activities including paying the printer? The pirate on the street? Or you, who felt so grand about thumbing a nose at the publisher?
“As I have written elsewhere, I owe my education in English entirely to low-cost editions of books bought from pirate street vendors or less-frequently at second hand bookstores (who typically would stock books imported from overseas library sales).”
Q: So do many of us. How many new Indian authors were available to you to read in these pirated editions? I can’t recall any except perhaps Rushdie and Roy. Or were you just happy reading the classics circulated over the years? How do you think those publishers, when they discovered and published these authors back in the day, survived to be able to continue publishing the books that centuries or decades later could appear as a pirate edition on the streets of India?
“Chiefly the gratuitous disparagement of intellectual production in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, (allegedly these countries cannot claim even a single “literary or commercial author brand” between them!) and the chastisement of India on account of the fact that “mature markets” don’t have analogous provisions on parallel import as we are trying to introduce.”
Q: It is a fact. Please dispute it with any other facts. Can you name any author from Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong that was discovered in their own countries and then became international? Without checking the internet, have you heard of any authors from these countries? Have you ever visited a bookshop in these countries to see the amount of books published locally and the proportion of those imported from Australia and the UK? I have lived in Malaysia and can assure you that there is no “gratuitous disparagement” in that statement by Mr Thomas.
“Then, as now, the issue was about incumbent interests in the heart of Empire – the London Booksellers – trying to preserve their dominions against upstart native enterprise in the colonies (in the 17th century, the Irish, Scots and Indians were regarded, alike, as barbarians – See Henry Maine etc) to the detriment of the reading public.”
Q: Sorry to disappoint you while you make this ridiculous comparison which erases the developments that have taken place in publishing since the 18th century. Recommend that you read ‘Print Areas: Book History in India’ for some examples of how Indian publishers had fought to be recognised as a separate territory and not remain a colonial outpost. That fight continued post Independence. The contribution of what we know as “multinational publishers” in independent India is immense and to belittle it is to deny a historical fact. I say this as a representative of an “independent” publishing house.
“The parallel import clause passes into copyright law, and an entire business model is spawned which focuses on providing access to books through parallel import. Since books tend, almost as a rule, to be much more expensive abroad, it would not make economic sense (there would be no incentive!) to import books where low-priced editions are already published in India. This will force more foreign publishers to aggressively publish low-priced editions in India – thus leading to a further expansion of the Indian publishing industry, and benefiting the Indian reader with access to wider material.”
Q: How did you come up with this stroke of genius? Let us examine another scenario: If parallel import clause comes in, foreign publishers will not give licenses for Indian editions, why should they? That itself will put a lot of publishers out of work and give them no investment to consider a publishing programme where they can license foreign editions and continue to publish Indian authors. Foreign publishers will wait until their markets are exhausted and then invest in shipping the books at lower prices to India. Secondly, foreign publishers, can, under the current export law, outsource printing to India, and retain a percentage for sale in India through the distributors. The billing is done in foreign currency. Sure you want to encourage this? Good for printers and distributors certainly, but ask them whether this is good for long term business. More importantly, would foreign publishers come looking for authors, spend time and effort on Indian authors, when they would just be happy to offload their books here, thanks to this law?
“Why don’t we have a law that statutorily prescribes a minimum royalty of say 50% of the price of the book? Wouldn’t that benefit the struggling author? Currently, the global average royalty an author receives is rarely over a measly 8-10%.”
Q: Million dollar question and an age-old one, but that would mean a book will end up costing atleast 5 times more. The author is the face of the book, so who cares what goes on behind the scenes? Consider this: The author send pages of a manuscript (handwritten, typed in MS Word) to a publishing house and it magically becomes a book! No editor needed to work on it, no designer needed to typeset it and no effort put in by the publisher at all, no salaries to pay, no printer waiting for a payment and no overheads to maintain! And importantly, no 50% industry-standard discounts for wholesalers and distributors. La-la land galore! Seriously, shall I call the pirate on the street to come pay my electricity bill? And you call me simple? Any good author will tell you how much they owe the final book to their editors/designers/publishers. Even today, when everybody with a keyboard is a writer and anybody with a WordPress blog is a publisher with an outlet for his/her vanity, what publishers do is vital.
India had 19% literacy at the time of Independence. Today it is 65%. The market for books is undoubtedly growing, but we are not yet a fully mature market. We are taking giant strides and publishers have a huge role to play. Do you really want foreign publishers to tell us what we should be reading? If this amendment goes through it will be at the cost of Indian publishing. The only people who will go happily into the sunset would be foreign publishers and Indian wholesalers. There is no Bill Gates among publishers who is rolling in millions as yet, contrary to what you have made it sound.
Vinutha,
Thanks for this lengthy missive. First, some preliminary clarifications before I reply pointwise.
- In my post I’ve repeatedly and deliberately used the phrase “big publishers” to distinguish from small publishers who are not my targets. The logic and operations of big publishers in India is very different from those of smaller publishers – simply on account of the bargaining power they command. Frequently their bargaining power is used to the detriment of authors who, on the whole, tend not to be very shrewd negotiators. I’m not going to burden this comment with examples – my point is simply that I don’t buy the sanctimonious account in which big publishers take risks for authors.
- I have great sympathy and respect for the labours involved in book production – especially for small publishers. However these are no different from the labours involved in any industry, who are not similarly privileged with legal monopolies.
- Another distinction I draw is between English publishing in India and ‘Indian publishing’ – I think the two are distinct (at least as far as the present issue is concerned), despite the pretensions of English publishing in India who frequently assume they represent the whole of Indian publishing. You have not responded to my provocation as to why vernacular books in India generally tend to be much cheaper than English books – despite being of identical quality. Why do I have to pay a premium for being an English reader? Or are all vernacular publishers uniformly of a lower quality?
- I think parallel import is an issue that only affects big publishers of English books and even among them only the subsidaries of multinational publishing enterprises. It will not harm authors, or a majority of Indian publishers much less signal the end of Indian writing!
> Q: could you please illuminate us with these examples that are “legion”?
You’ll find that this literature goes back a long way from the petitions of the Stationers company, to the writings of Francis Hargrave, Noah Webster etc. In more recent times, you’ll find these accounts in thick industry dossiers prepared by the MPAA, RIAA etc. You can go looking for them yourself – shoudn’t be so hard to find since they’re so ubiquitous.
>Do you actually mean to say that publishing has thrived around the world without any concern for the people that >they publish for? did we all sit and conspire to hoodwink our readers by imagining the costs of producing a book
No. But they haven’t ‘thrived’ out of unalloyed goodwill of publishers for their authors either. It’s a business, like every other. Unlike other businesses, it has been extremely successful in leveraging the aura of the author to wrench monopolistic benefits for itself at the cost of consumers. Losing the sanctimony would be nice.
Like every business, the publishing industry tries to garner what legal favours and privileges it can, from the state. That’s what this furor over parallel imports is about – an industry trying to preserve a trade restriction for itself. The ‘author’ is only a device the publishers habitually use to garner sympathy. That’s the limited point I’m making here.
As to ‘imagined’ costs of books – sometimes the prices of books do make me wonder..
> Q: Can you please prove otherwise with some “information” from your end?
From the literature I’m familiar with, there’s Ulrike Starke’s account of the Naval Kishore Press, Priya Joshi’s account of fiction in India.. some other writing I’d be happy to forward you.
Unfortunately most large publishers in India are privately held, so the exact extent of their fortunes is hard to estimate.
Please send me evidence if you think we haven’t had any thriving publishing houses in India.
> “If street piracy and second-hand sales had been killed off twenty years ago in India, the market for English books in India would not have expanded at all.”
> Q: If publishers did not publish, what pray would the pirates pirate? And, who, would pay the bills of the poor author that worked on the manuscript and the editor who worked with her, and the designer who composed the book, had it not been the publisher who put the money in to fund these activities including paying the printer? The pirate on the street? Or you, who felt so grand about thumbing a nose at the publisher?
As instructive text on this aspect is Rimi Chatterjee’s Pirates and Philanthropists: British Publishers and Copyright in India 1880-1935 (from Movable Type – Book History in India) .
Often, especially in the early history of Indian publishing, the pirate is indistinguishable from the publisher.
The pirate on the street, as you point out, only pirates English books. Again, I’d like to repeat my question about vernacular books which tend to be priced equivalent to pirated English books. How is it that these authors are paid. How is it that their editors are paid, and their designers and their printers?
Why do street pirates not pirate vernacular books that are just as easily amenable to piracy?
I ‘thumb my nose’ (how quaint!) only at big English language publishers who somehow believe that they have a divine right to extort.
>How many new Indian authors were available to you to read in these pirated editions? I >can’t recall any except perhaps Rushdie and Roy. Or were you just happy reading the classics circulated over the >years? How do you think those publishers, when they discovered and published these authors back in the day, >survived to be able to continue publishing the books that centuries or decades later could appear as a pirate >edition on the streets of India?
Publishers discover authors, in the same way as the Europeans discovered the New World. Much credit to them, I suppose.
But you’re onto something here. Viz, it only makes sense to pirate big names – who tend to go with big publishers. This will be the same stuff that gets parallel-imported into India (because why bother with the less popular stuff?).
If even pirates don’t see any sense in pirating “lesser” Indian authors, then why would parallel importing them make any economic sense? All the ‘remaindered’ Shoba De novels parallelly imported from the world wouldn’t induce me to buy a single one of them.
On the other hand, street piracy will suffer, unfortunately. Hm.
> Q: It is a fact. Please dispute it with any other facts. Can you name any author from Malaysia, Singapore or Hong >Kong that was discovered in their own countries and then became international? Without checking the internet, >have you heard of any authors from these countries? Have you ever visited a bookshop in these countries to see >the amount of books published locally and the proportion of those imported from Australia and the UK? I have >lived in Malaysia and can assure you that there is no “gratuitous disparagement” in that statement by Mr Thomas.
Once again that colonial language of discovery – as if these authors were fossil remains or tropical islands!
Presumably the intellectual wasteland in these countries is solely on account of the fact that these countries permit parallel importing. Or is there another explanation? I would love to hear your account of how these countries have failed to produce even a single big name (or little name) author “who became international”. What fools they must all be. Btw, are these ‘mature’ markets or not? Its hard to keep track..
> Q: Sorry to disappoint you while you make this ridiculous comparison which erases the developments that have taken place in publishing since the 18th century. Recommend that you read ‘Print Areas: Book History in India’ for some examples of how Indian publishers had fought to be recognised as a separate territory and not remain a colonial outpost. That fight continued post Independence.
I think it’s truly ludicrous how you’ve managed to misread my argument. Here’s what I meant: It is my contention that the stakes involved in the parallel imports clause are the highest only for the narrow set of foreign publishers and their subsidiaries in India. It is their business model that will be imperiled (if at all) – just as in the 16th century the Stationers’ Company in London were. The Stationers’ Company in the 16th century invoked the figure of the struggling author, not from any philanthropic motive, but essentially to protect their own vested business interests – just like the big (mostly foreign) publisher brigade is leading the onslaught against the parallel import clause – not out of any concern for the author, but to protect their own precious “territorial” rights based business model.
I’m aware of how Indian publishers “fought for their independence”. For their pains, they were frequently labelled pirates by the Macmillans of yesteryear. I’ve referred to Rimi Chatterjee’s work.
> Q: How did you come up with this stroke of genius?
Its easy since I live in India ,and not a mature market like Malaysia or Hong Kong or Singapore.
>Let us examine another scenario: If parallel import clause comes in, foreign publishers will not give licenses for >Indian editions, why should they?
Why: Wonderful little thing in our Copyright Act called compulsory licensing – Sec 32A.
>That itself will put a lot of publishers out of work and give them no investment to >consider a publishing >programme where they can license foreign editions and continue to publish Indian authors.
The Copyright Act doesn’t exist to keep big publishers in business- however much they may pretend this is the case. I think we’ve hit on the core of your misunderstanding of copyright law. There it is. Copyright exists to protect authors. Heartless, but true nonetheless.
But I commend you for your candor. Finally we have some truth. This *is*, as you say, about the publishing industry attempting venally to save its legal monopoly, and not about the benefits to the author at all.
>Foreign publishers will wait until their markets are exhausted and then invest in shipping the books at lower prices >to India.
Incorrect! They’ll be forced to license to Indian publishers, or risk foregoing the large (immature) market in India. Pirates in India will be quicker. Let them only try.
> Secondly, foreign publishers, can, under the current export law, outsource printing to India, and retain a >percentage for sale in India through the distributors. The billing is done in foreign currency. Sure you want to >encourage this? Good for printers and distributors certainly, but ask them whether this is good for long term >business.
OR maybe they’ll outsource publishing entirely to India. Woudn’t that be grand. AND a more realistic forecast given the inexorable logic of globalization in all other spheres.
>More importantly, would foreign publishers come looking for authors, spend time and effort on Indian >authors, >when they would just be happy to offload their books here, thanks to this law?
True.. what COULD we possibly do without our benevolent white masters, who pick our authors out of the chaff for us.
And of course, being immature readers from immature markets, we’d simply, sheepishly trade in our Amitav Ghoshes for the Stephanie Meyers they’d offload on us.
I’m astounded by the self-effacement here – especially after the jingoism about Indian publishing in previous paragraphs.
> “Why don’t we have a law that statutorily prescribes a minimum royalty of say 50% of the price of the book? Wouldn’t that benefit the struggling author? Currently, the global average royalty an author receives is rarely over a measly 8-10%.”
> 50% industry-standard discounts for wholesalers and distributors.
Whoa… waittaminute.. lets see here.. .50% to the distributor… 10% to the author .. and that’s 40% to the publisher!
So when I buy a book from a pirated bookseller, I’m actually not ripping off the author so much. Thanks, I feel much better about my piracy now.
How about a clause that stipulates that copyrights revert to authors every 5 years so that they get to periodically renegotiate their contracts?
>La-la land galore! Seriously, shall I call the pirate on the street to come pay my electricity bill? And you call me >simple? Any good author will tell you how much they owe the final book to their editors/designers/publishers. Even >today, when everybody with a keyboard is a writer and anybody with a WordPress blog is a publisher with an >outlet for his/her vanity, what> publishers do is vital.
Why didn’t we name this the Publisher’s electricity bill act? Oh wait, because copyright doesn’t exist to protect the publisher… which is sortof why you have to keep raking up the author.
You’re doing a bad, or at best naive job of this! You should at least have included the standard spiel about how nobody would ever have the incentive to be an Indian writer now because of the parallel import clause. I know it sounds silly, but that’s the way its done.
I think Thomas Abraham’s piece was better in that respect.
>but we are not yet a fully mature market.
Ayyo! I’ve been to these fully mature markets where books are unaffordably priced and people don’t read newspapers anymore. I think I’ll take my chances with my anarchic “immature” market!
>Do you really want foreign publishers to tell >us what we should be reading? If this amendment goes through >it >will be at the cost of Indian publishing. The >only people who will go happily into the sunset would be foreign >publishers and Indian wholesalers.
I call your bluff. Indian publishing will thrive. English publishing in India will become civilized. English books will be cheaper.
>There is no >Bill Gates among publishers who is rolling in millions as yet, >contrary to what you have made it >sound.
That doesn’t mean there are no Ambanis among them, rolling in the crores. (Aside: Why don’t we have any women millionaires to mock btw?)
Before I conclude, I must admit that I’m more than a little flattered by your ‘discovery’ of a ‘poetic’ streak to my prose. If the parallel import amendment passes, I pledge to rescue your independent publishing house from collapse by offering you my first book for publication. How’s that for a guarantee that Indian writing will not fade?
Prashant, once you get over your misplaced notion that there is a neo-colonial conspiracy here, you might actually bother to make an effort at understanding the unique economics of publishing. Despite your commendation for my “candor” and your remonstration of what a “naïve job” I was doing, I will allow the readers of your blog (presumably there are some) to judge the merits of what is being said. Hopefully they will also judge which one of us is being “sanctimonious”. It would also do you good to examine how you write, so as to save yourself from feeling any ludicrousness. I am listing a few facts that should address the highlights instead of wasting my breath on a repartee:
1. About 30% to 40% of publishing activity in India is in English. So English is very much the single language in which most publishing is done in India and very much part of the term we know as “Indian publishing”. Hindi accounts for about 40% of Indian publishing (a term, which includes English language by the way). That leaves out 20% to 30% of the market for other Indian languages. “Vernacular” is a colonial term which creates a blanket identity for all the other languages in India, a term which many of us hate the use of.
2. I am also happy to inform you that small publishers in India, if you cared to check, are not threatened by the big publishers. We all co-exist because there is a lot of room to grow here just now and there are many of us waiting to grow. The infrastructure created by big publishers works to the advantage of small publishers and we are in fact able to place our books in different parts of the country thanks to this network. Contrary to your claim, the proposed amendment not only affects the big publishers, it affects all of us.
3. Publishers are businesspeople. Would you rather they depended on corporate funds and NGO funds like some publishers are now beginning to do? But publishers are not producing something that people know they definitely want, like textile manufacturers. Publishing is a hugely risk-taking business in a country where the reading habit is restricted to about 2% of the population. Per capita rate for book purchase in India is one book a year and not because of prices (which are the lowest in the world already!) but because our competition comes from Bollywood, television and video games.
4. The publishing chain includes these actors: Publisher>Author/s>Editor>Designers+ illustrators>Process House(in the case of four colour books)>Printers (which includes binders, packagers)>Wholesalers/Distributors>Booksellers. Now do the math with a book that costs Rs 400. You talk as if the publisher is pocketing 40% and the editors, designers and printers are doing everything out of charity! Book pricing is based on a formula, which any publisher will be happy to explain to you. (Thanks for your offer to send me Ulrike’s book and Moveable Type, I have both with me already.)
5. Not all authors understand this chain either. But the author-publisher relationship is extremely different than relationships in any other industry. Publishers are not service-providers and authors are not clients. Publishers and authors don’t work like enemies forced to depend on each other. Many authors are just wonderful and become lifelong associates and friends. Some of them think theirs is the only bestseller-in-waiting that the publisher should pay attention to. They expect to be taken on book tours at publishers’ cost, get reviewed in every newspaper and magazine in the world and assume it can be “arranged” by publishers, and constantly complain about how their books are not available in some small back lane store of Timbuktu. Some of them treat the publishers like secretaries. Many people, like you, fail to see the investment it takes to put a book out there. And, many like you, fail to see that a published book is as much a publisher’s baby as it is an author’s. The copyright is the author’s for the text, but the edition is the publisher’s because of the investment that she has made in it. The publisher indeed has a huge hand in making an author a bestselling one. Which is why, the clause 2M which removes the publisher’s right to have a say in the author granting the import of foreign editions of the same book, is a GRAVE concern for Indian publishers.
6. Indian-languages publishing is a different scene altogether. The market is limited to readers in those languages, which reflects in the percentage I drew up in point no. 1. Before you take off again, I am fully aware that a bulk of the writing in Indian languages is in many cases far superior to Indian English writing. I have no idea on what basis you say that the quality of publishing is the same. I can’t find a Kannada book which is as well produced (technically, typesetting and print-production parameters), however good the writing is. But readership patterns of English language and Kannada language are very different in India. Undoubtedly things are changing (Navakarnataka recently published a book on the crisis of the mothertongues, in English, and it was nicely produced); and we are not yet at a stage where Indians are reading Indian literature emerging in the different Indian languages. The economics of differential book pricing between Indian and English language books is primarily because of costs involved in producing, marketing and distributing the book. If a Kannada publisher was selling his books in bookshops across the country, the overall price would definitely go up. Currently, his booksellers are sitting in a limited geography. His warehousing costs are less, he is hardly licensing any editions, he doubles up as editor in many cases etc. The chain is different. And yes, his author does get less at the end of the day than an author in English. That should change, and that can only change if more readers get added to Kannada than there are now and the geography of the spread increases. Simple market economics, no rocket science.
7. The logic of piracy is something I don’t know, and I can’t quite figure out what analogy you were trying to achieve with the Shobha De books. But I am confident that if a Kannada book became a bestseller (selling over 25000 copies) and got international attention you will find a pirate edition of it on Mysore’s streets. Pirate editions don’t come out until the book has received glamourised attention, as you may know already.
8. Like it or not, it is the Indian English publishing scene that has given a global face to Indian publishing. Many Indian language publishers are propelling themselves ahead by borrowing from lessons learned by English language publishers in India. Whether this is right or wrong is another debate and not in the purview of this one, but I assure you that the ones that do so are not complaining.
9. If the stakes set were high only for the “narrow set” of publishers as you described, how do you explain the Federation of Indian Publishers joining with the Association of Publishers in India and speaking for the wider set? Ever since the government lifted restrictions on foreign ownership in publishing companies in 2000, FIP has been complaining to the government about the “invasion of foreign capital” taking away profits. And yet, in this regard, the two parties have joined hands. Surely you don’t think that Indian publishers have no mind of their own and are under the thumb of the “colonial masters”?
10. Frankly, I don’t see how clause 32A counters the problems posed by parallel imports. I look forward to any useful insight into this.
11. I have no idea what you know of readership patterns in India. But yes, Stephanie Meyers is selling more than Amitav Ghosh for the simple reason that they are read by two different readership profiles. Young people in India form one third the population and 25% of them are readers, which is encouraging (NBT-NCAER study on youth readership). A sample survey conducted by the Tehelka magazine on book reading habits in Indian metros revealed that only 42% of book buyers were habitual readers, while others bought books for self improvement and English-language skills, i.e. books that have a take-home value. It is no wonder then that in 2009–2010, the industry saw an increase in the number of children’s books, management books, cook books, self-help and self-improvement books. However much fiction grabs headlines, the books that are really selling in big numbers are academic, management and how-to books.
12. Many of us in the publishing industry are fully aware of what needs to change within, and we have demanded stronger copyright laws ourselves. But allowing parallel imports is definitely not the answer. This is for those readers trying to make sense of why publishers are protesting: India has a unique publishing industry. The country positions itself today as a global hub of publishing, with a claim of
90,000 titles published in a year by an estimated 19,000 publishers (many of these are not registered with the national ISBN agency). It is also acknowledged as being the sixth largest book-producing country and the third-largest producer of English books in the world. This also makes it an attractive destination for foreign publishers from English speaking countries to work with India (USA, UK, Australia-NZ). With the economy developing at 8.8% and middle class rapidly entering the consumer sector, domestic publishing is thriving in India. Indian authors are slowly getting more bargaining power now than ever before. Many authors have come forward in support of the publishers’ protest. Unlike with other majority English-speaking and -publishing countries (and I don’t mean Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore which hardly have indigenous publishing activity) where organized publishing industry has existed for a far longer time to develop itself into a mature industry, India is not the same and neither is it culturally homogenous with the rest of them. What we want to read should not be dictated by other publishers, but should be selected by our publishers, who are far more in touch with the needs of a growing India, where we still battling with our unique demographics in education and literacy. Publishing in India is a fragile ecosystem.
I would like to point you to a few links:
i.) Anurav Sinha in The Mint: http://www.livemint.com/2010/12/31203850/Writing-on-the-wall.html
ii.) Bloomberg video on the campaign: http://legalindian.com/2011/02/jaipur-literature-festival-2011-copyright-law-amendments/
iii.) Press Conference by API and FIP: http://www.exchange4media.com/e4m/news/fullstory.asp?section_id=5&news_id=40748&tag=33242
iv.) A somewhat old piece by Chandrahas Choudhury on Indian writing: http://www.livemint.com/2009/12/25202238/A-welcome-and-new-maturity.html
Vinutha,
Once again, thanks for your lengthy reply. I assure you I have a lot of readers – which is why I continue to post your epic comments on my blog. I think an open discussion always benefits.
I’m not going to reply point wise to your comment because I have no quarrel with it – you provide me a very detailed account of publishing as it stands in India today. It’s a very good corporate presentation of how the Indian publishing industry functions in India and especially in English, but its not a good argument about why this should not be susceptible to change like every manufacturing industry – especially if consumers stand to benefit from it.
Once again, as I’ve said in my earlier reply to you, I deeply respect and value the labour that you put into your work. But I think you’ve been using this argument as a wet blanket to guilt-trip people into silence and pre-empt alternate thinking on the models that might emerge from this amendment. Greatly reduced, this is how your argument sounds “We work so hard, hence we must be right”.
To reiterate, I think your fears of the demise of the Indian publishing industry are exaggerated and nothing in your comment has convinced me otherwise.
More here:
http://dearddsez.blogspot.com/2011/02/some-questions-in-response-to-poetic.html
True, you’re missing the whole point. It’s not about big or small publishers. You’re confusing issues here.
These are the final answers from our end:
http://dearddsez.blogspot.com/2011/02/round-3-of-thomas-abrahams-rebuttal-to.html
Pointless to even try holding a debate when you’ve already made up your mind.
Divya
Dear Prashant, while it is very generous indeed of you to post my “epic” in response to yours, and while I appreciate your appreciation of our efforts, I have just this to say: Publishing is not a manufacturing industry. It is a creative industry. Are we right because we work hard? No. We are right because we know what we are talking about, since we are talking with experience. But are you right in reducing Indian publishing to a group of cheats and louts? No. I don’t see anyone needing to guilt-trip into anything. My job revolves around encouraging new voices to enter the public domain. Although now I am tempted to say that clients whose lawyers don’t win cases should be reimbursed.
Best wishes.
:D..ok, quickly, I will support your lawyer reform bill if you support the parallel import clause. Deal?
Will think about it, thanks. Quickly too, Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables (Princeton University Press) @ less than Rs 600 would be impossible for you to get today even if parallel imports was allowed at this time. It is selling at a retail price of $29.95 (Rs 1360ish) and best price, which is from Amazon is $19.77 (Rs 907). Whichever way you do it, you would have to wait for a paperback if you want to get this edition at cheaper than Rs 600. Moser Baer logic for books in India… you should try a hand at becoming a publisher and test it out. Heard of the great Dinanath Malhotra and Hind Pocket Books and the pocket book revolution in India?
Oh, and it won’t come any cheaper in hardcover until many years later when the book gets remaindered. Prices don’t drop when it is in print. Sorry I missed that. You don’t want Gyan Prakash to get a 10% or 12% of Rs 600 for the joy or knowledge that the book might give you ?
Ill buy Gyan prakash a drink when I meet him and we’ll be quits. I have the same payback plan for all my authors.
Wait! So parallel import wont affect the sales of major/popular titles like Mumbai Fables!? That’s a really damaging admission for your camp! You really *are* from an independent publisher!
I have a heads I win, tails you lose argument. Either the amendment will being down prices which is good for the consumer, or it won’t, in which case your fears are unfounded.
Will parallel import lead instead to the sale in india of hundreds of copies of your books on Sonabais craft(Rs 1200) Or of Sacred spaces ( Rs 3500)? I’d be really coflicted if that were the case. On the one hand its too expensive for me to consider purchasing in the ordinary course-I’m not your target demographic. But If it was available for much cheaper even in a damaged copy I’d definitely consider buying it. On the other hand if your regular consumers were diverted to this second hand market, that might be truly worrisome since its not a mass market you service, only a niche one. I still don’t think a) your print run is so high as to wind up in india as so many remaindered copies b) your target clients are the the sorts who would rummage thro second hand book stores looking for the few copies that do trickle back-so your client base remains undiminished post- amendment