Luke Slattery in The Australian on the troubles facing the Australian book industry, in particular the discounted prices offered by online retailers and the commercial realities facing Australian publishers.

The point was brought home to me recently when a distin­guished Australian writer took the manuscript of his next book to his preferred publisher. The publishing director pronounced it an excellent work but added one caveat: he would have to run it past the sales and marketing people […] Marketing calcu­lated the book might sell a mere 3000 copies. That’s a lot more than many of the master­works of European modernism sold in their first editions. But it was not enough to interest the publisher to give the book a life.

I retailed [sic] this story to the repres­ent­ative of another Australian publishing house and he responded by pointing out that all such decisions were made with a view to commercial reality. Fair enough. But publishers should not complain if book buyers adopted the same hard-nosed criterion when making purchases, in which case they surely would opt for the best online deal.