Richard Flanagan gave a fantastic closing speech at the Sydney Writers' Festival last night. Here's an extract:
Courage does not seem to have spent an evening at the Lodge. Rather, to placate the cruel gods of commerce, the reform the Rudd Government is considering is feeding the monster more victims. The concentration of ownership of book retailing in the hands of one or two chains as in Britain and the USA has been catastrophic for the book industries in those countries.
The Australian book retail sector—with its strong and varied mix of independents, chains and discount department stores —is regarded as one of the healthiest and most diverse in the world, enabling large volume, large variety and price competition.
Yet many independent booksellers believe the ending of territorial copyright will lead to the further closure of independent bookstores, concentrating bookselling further into the hands of the discount department stores owned by Coles and Woolworths, and the larger retail chains, which have a record of often charging above the recommended retail price for books and even discriminating actively against small publishers.
Australian independent bookstores have for decades supported the unknown Australian writers, built the audience for books for us all, from David Malouf to Christos Tsiolkis, backed the Chloe Hoopers and Joan Londons, reminded us why Helen Garner mattered and Don Watson was important, persuaded us to buy a first Australian book by a Nam Le or a Steve Toltz. They are also the path into which books from elsewhere that matter are introduced to this country, and keep our book culture from becoming gangrenous. Their future under this proposal is bleak indeed.
Writers and books that matter, will become like an endangered species with no habitat left to support them. The fate of most of them in the large chain and discount mega store culture will be that of marsupials in new outer suburbs, dicing with death on freeways, not knowing until that short moment of blinding light dazzle that this is no longer their home.
This quote was pulled from the full speech at Australian For Books and available below.
