Also: The Ä¢¹½´«Ã½’s wifi was all screwed up during the recording. Most of the big gaps have been erased, but it is a bit choppy at the start, for which we apologize.

This week’s music is “” by Australia’s own King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

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Oddly enough, it seems like Australia has a related, yet different sort of problem—publishers there are lobbying to keep a ban on importing cheap editions of books:

The Council of Australian Governments decided last week to ask the Productivity Commission to review copyright laws restricting the parallel importation of books.

These laws give the Australian copyright owner control over who is allowed to import books subject to the 30-day rule. Under this rule, local publishers must supply a book within 30 days of its publication overseas, otherwise booksellers can import directly from the foreign publisher. (via )

Behind this restriction seems to lie a much bigger problem of distribution. Something’s wrong when it could take more than 30 days to supply a copy of a published book. (I’ve been thinking a lot about distribution recently—it’s a side-effect of doing sales calls—and was planning to write a long post about this today . . . )

The ran a copy of the letter sent from A&R to Tower Books, which contains such choice bits as this:

We have recently completed a piece of work to rank our suppliers in terms of the net profit they generate for our business. We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, and over 40% of our supplier agreements fall below our requirements in terms of profit earned. [. . .]

Accordingly, we will be rationalizing our supplier numbers and setting a minimum earnings ratio of income to trade purchases that we expect to achieve from our suppliers.

I am writing to you because TOWER BOOKS falls into this category of unacceptable profitability.

As a consequence we would invite you to pay the attached invoice by Aug 17th, 2007. The payment represents the gap for your business, and moves it from an unacceptable level of profitability, to above our minimum threshold.

OK, there are a few things I want to point out. First off, although the U.S. should never follow a trend originating in Australia, I wouldn’t be surprised if this idea comes up in future meetings with B&N or Amazon or some other U.S. chain. And I hope U.S. publishers won’t stand for this. The book availability at B&N is already pretty damn questionable . . . and it’s frightening to think this could get even worse.

Also, I love the insertion of “TOWER BOOKS” in all caps. Really thoughtful. And the bold italics (in the original!) of the demand for payment is pretty classy as well. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to misrepresent this . . . it’s an “invitation to pay.” I guess that is classy.