The Conventions and Regulation of Book Culture

[...]while parallel importation regulations remain a contested aspect of Australian bookselling practice, it could be argued that deregulation around which books are published and sold, and the price that they are sold for, has made the Australian publishing industry a viable book market within the Anglophone literary sphere, and has influenced the reading tastes of the nation. [...]the practices and products that make up literary culture-the act of publishing or reading a book, the ways that people come together to talk about books, the book objects themselves-are changing. [...]state and federal policy continue to support and shape literary culture. [...]neither the practices that constitute literary culture, nor the spaces in which those practices take place, are necessarily subject to the same regulations that, pre-digital, may have controlled them. In what book historian Robert Darnton, writing for the New York Review of Books, described as an 'odd spectacle', this legal action saw 'foreign governments defending a European notion of culture against the capitalistic inroads of an American company, and submitting their case to Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District Court of New York'.