Support includes an Australian Universities Press to showcase publicly funded research and a permanent industry council
Labor has committed $12m to establish an Australian Universities Press and a permanent Book Industry Innovation Council to try to halt the downturn in domestic publishing, if it wins government.
The initiatives were recommended by the industry through a final report of the Book Industry Collaborative Council released on Monday as the publishing industry bleeds through international internet sales and book retailers continue to close.
The collaborative council, which began its work in 2010, brought together representatives of publishing, printing and book retailing for the first time.
Labor would make the council permanent to continue to advocate for the Australian publishing industry and collaborate to promote the growth of domestic publishing.
The Australian Universities Press would showcase research work from universities, particularly the humanities.
The minister for higher education and innovation, senator Kim Carr, said the new publisher would be another boost to the industry by reducing costs and increasing collaboration between universities to encourage more scholarly works made available to build knowledge and enrich public discourse.
"Too much publicly funded research and writing remains unpublished, or under-exposed, particularly in the humanities, arts and social sciences, and with this initiative we want to bring more of that work into prominence in the public domain," Carr said.
Australian publishers and the university sector welcomed the announcement, while calling for bipartisan support for the recommendations of the Book Industry Collaborative Council.
The chief executive of Melbourne University Press, Louise Adler, said at a time when multinational giant Amazon was the biggest bookseller in Australia, the domestic industry needed to find innovative ways to support books.
Adler said it would be remiss of publishers not to be speaking to both sides of politics about the issues for the book trade.
"All credit to Kim Carr who got involved in this process early," Adler said. "But successive Coalition governments have felt a little aggrieved that the arts industry tends to support Labor when the Coalition has been very supportive of the arts.
"Senator George Brandis was the sole voice to say books were noticeably absent from Simon Crean's arts policy Creative Australia."
Lou Johnson, managing director of Simon & Schuster Australia, also welcomed the announcement as a way to promote Australian content and the industry more generally.
The vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Professor Glyn Davis, said the announcement was important and he hoped the proposals would attract bipartisan support.
"Although anything announced in election context is never ideal, this is the result of the end of a long process, I hope [it is] seen as a bipartisan process," he said.
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