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By David Rothman

If any nation ought to be e-book country, it’s Australia—where physical libraries can be hundreds of miles apart. I’ve never been there but from afar have a special affection for the place, the setting for such literary classics as My Brilliant Career, on which the Judy Davis movie was based. So what’s the deal on the e-book front? The TeleBlog’s Carol Jurd will share her thoughts on this in the near future, with a special emphasis on e-books in K-12. And meanwhile an informative feature story has just come out in the Sydney Morning Herald

“Publishers admit that e-books still make up only a tiny percentage of the annual $1billion plus book trade in Australia,” reports David Adams, who mentions Jon Jermey, a regular on the eBook Community list and a TeleBlog commenter.

Waiting for more Net-hip readers

“I think what you’re facing is a generational change now and you’ve got young people coming through who are much more iPod-savvy and mobile phone-savvy and you’re going to probably see a market begin to grow for that,” Adams quotes Marie McCaskill, chief executive of the Australian Publishing Association. “Most of the publishers are gearing themselves up for that.” Meanwhile publisher Andrew Wilkins talks about the need for better hardware—he’s expecting that one device will the next few years— and the hassles of the Tower of eBabel. Let’s hope that the IDPF can leverage its new epub standard to the max through a logo approach for unencrypted books and go on to address the DRM question. Who needs to worry about dominant software or devices if everything can read the standards?

Details on Australia’s PG

Surprisingly, the Australian-based eBooks.com, one of the giants of independent e-book retailing, goes unmentioned in the feature story. But the story does point to former Australian librarian Bruce Preston’s site and the Australian Project Gutenberg. The Australian site, founded by retired accountant Colin Choat and visited by more than a million readers last year, has a special interest in promoting Australian classics, but among the most popular titles are Gone with the Wind, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, 1984 and The Great Gatsby. While Hollywood persuaded Australia to stretch out copyright terms, some otherwise-affected classics already online appear to have been grandfathered in.

A little fame for Jon Jermey

About TeleBlogger commenter Jon Jermey, who has digitized some 20 books for Project Gutenberg, the Herald reports he has read more 100 on his Palm PDA, focuses on old detective stories but has a general interest in neglected books. “If I do come across an old book that looks like it’s been neglected and needs to be made more widely available, then I’ll try and do that.”

The Herald piece contains other Gutenberg-related information, which I’ll pass on in a separate post later today.

It also tells about Interactive Publications in Queenland. IP “is not only publishing ebooks that have text, audio and, in some cases, visual elements, but is also publishing interactive books that allow a ‘viewer’ to find their own way through an ebook. Take publisher David Reiter’s work, The Gallery, which was published back in 2000. Based on the metaphor of walking into a large gallery or museum, it allows people to find their way through the work by clicking buttons and hypertext that take them to other places. Dr Reiter…believes digital technologies allow publishers to offer more versions of books as well as offering people a choice of buying some or all of them. ‘That’s the way we see things going,” he says.’” IP charges a reading fee of several hundred dollars (Australian, dollars, presumably) refundable if the house publishes you.

OK, now stay tuned for Carol’s forthcoming piece. Meanwhile, help her out. What salient aspects of the Australian e-book scene are missing from the above?

 
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