Scholarly Book Publishing in Australia: The Impact of the Last Decade

摘要

This article lends perspective on developments and trends in Australian scholarly book publishing from the late 1980s to early 2002. Australia, with a population of 19 million, has current economic growth rates of 3.7 per cent with forecasts well ahead of other Western industrialised economies. The economy (GDP) grew by 46.2 per cent between 1990 and the end of 2001, while the population increase was 13.6 per cent. Australia is the twelfth-largest book market in the world, and the third-largest English-language market, but it is still less than 5 per cent of the market for international scholarly books. According to an international survey1, Australia spent on books of all categories 69 per cent per capita of what US citizens spent, but this still represented only 5 per cent of the US dollar total, and 26 per cent of the UK's expenditure.