More than 160 books by noted Australian authors have been rescued from oblivion, including six winners of the Miles Franklin literary award.
The three-year project, which culminated at the end of last year, has put out-of-print titles by Thea Astley, Mem Fox, Charmian Clift and Anita Heiss back in circulation and into ebook format for the first time.
Five volumes of poetry and verse novels by Dorothy Porter and four titles in Garry Disher’s Wyatt crime thriller series have also been resuscitated, under the Australian project Untapped. Researchers from Melbourne Law School and Macquarie Business School have collaborated on the literary heritage scheme with authors, agents, libraries, the Australian Society of Authors, and digital publishing platform Ligature Press.
And along the way, invaluable data on how Australians consume ebooks in a rapidly expanding market has been collected – published in the report Untapped Potential, released late last year.
Lead author of the report, Paul Crosby, a cultural economist at Macquarie Business School, said the main impetus for the project was the realisation that six winners of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin, had gone out of circulation: Vance Palmer’s The Big Fellow (1959), George Turner’s The Cupboard under the Stairs (1962), The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) and The Acolyte (1972), both by Thea Astley, Tom Flood’s Oceana Fine (1989), and the controversial The Hand that Signed the Paper, the 1994 creation of Helen Dale (formerly Darville/Demidenko).
“These books weren’t generating any money for the authors and they had been important contributions to Australia’s literary heritage,” said Crosby.
“Now, not only are they getting royalties from the ebook sales and commissions from libraries, they have advances on the print copy and all of this from books that had just been forgotten by publishers.”
Most of the 161 Australian titles revived by Untapped were first published years before the advent of reading devices such as Kindle and Kobo.
According to data and business intelligence platform Statista, the projected revenue for the Australian ebook market is expected to reach almost $320m in 2025.
By 2027, an estimated 3.6 million Australians will be ebook consumers.
Crosby, Rebecca Giblin, an associate professor from Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, and their colleagues consulted libraries, authors and online lending platforms, before whittling down a long wishlist to a short one. Then it came down to what titles were actually feasible to obtain, in terms of publishing rights.
In Australia, most publishing contracts require an author to assign their publishing rights over to the publisher for the entire term of copyright, which may last for a century or longer (usually 70 years after the writer’s death). Yet most contracts contain no obligation on the part of the publisher to return rights to the author if the publisher is no longer using them.
Such rigid copyright agreements have been a major contributor to Australia’s disappearing literary heritage, Crosby said.
As of 2020, 10 of the 62 former winners of the Miles Franklin were unavailable to Australian book purchasers in any form, 23 were unavailable as audiobooks and 40 were unavailable as ebooks.
Over the past three years, the 161 titles obtained through Untapped and digitised by Ligature Press have made their way into library collections across the country and had their progress tracked.
Within the 12 month period after re-publication, those ebooks had collectively clocked up a circulation of 15,688, averaging about 40 loans a day.
The most borrowed ebook – Kickback, the first in Disher’s Wyatt series – was lent out 1,744 times, proving that although the book first published in 1991 had long been sent to book purgatory by its publisher, there was still considerable unmet demand from the public.
The report also found some evidence that the surge in ebook lending from the Untapped collection translated into increased public demand to buy the titles.
Although almost all marketing of the collection came through libraries who let readers know they could borrow the ebooks online, almost 6,000 digital copies of the titles were sold during the 12 months after release across the Amazon, Apple and Kobo.
There have been long-standing accusations within the publishing industry that Amazon, the world’s largest ebook publisher, discourages authors and publishers from distributing ebooks to libraries, due to perceptions the practice eats into sales revenue.
Under the National e-deposit (NED) scheme which came into Australian law in 2019, the only obligation publishers have to libraries is to provide one copy of every ebook published to the National Library of Australia, and to each state and territory library, for archival purposes.
Crosby says one of the questions the Untapped project sought to answer was whether Amazon’s “cannibalisation” claims stacked up.
“The data to prove it just wasn’t out there,” he says. “In terms of sales, all of this data is siloed behind whoever is selling a book, and there was a lack of coordination between libraries about their lending figures. So by becoming the publisher, we could control that data.
“We could say, OK: we know how many books are getting borrowed, we know how many books are getting sold – what’s the actual effect from having these books in libraries? And what we found was there just wasn’t a negative effect.”
Crosby believes the Untapped project has delivered compelling evidence to lawmakers that Australia’s copyright laws need reforming.
“What we’d like to see is the introduction of some time limits … recognition that if the publisher isn’t using the rights, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth anything.”
Such reform would not only benefit Australian readers but also Australian authors, by creating additional income streams.
According to 2022 figures, Australian authors receive on average $18,200 per annum from their work as a writer.
Untapped generated about $120,000 in additional income for authors in the project’s first 12 months, through ebook royalties from both retail sales and library licensing.
