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 . . . )

Aflame Books is an independent publisher based in the UK. It publishes, in English translation, works from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; works whose brilliance has been hidden from the English-speaking world by the barriers of culture and language.

Very admirable and necessary mission, and the books sound interesting. Titles will be “distributed” though IPG in the U.S., so they will be available, although hopefully Aflame will be able to find a worth U.S. house to publish U.S. editions of some of the titles. It’s just a fact of business that a U.S. publisher can do a lot more for a book in the States than a UK publisher can, regardless of distributor. And if the point is finding readers to appreciate these books, it’s better all around for UK presses to sell U.S. rights than to pretend they’re going to make a killing in the U.S. market.