AustLit

'In 2001, as part of my teaching in the Graduate Program in Publishing Studies at RMIT, I provided students with a snapshot of the publishing industry as I saw it at the end of the twentieth century. Compiling it wasn't as easy as I'd thought it would be, because at the time the trade — as it was still quaintly referred to — was poorly served by 'real' data. There were the biennial Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures on publisher activity, and the APA (Australian Publishers Association, which had changed from being the Australian Book Publishers Association in 1995) compiled a list of its members' bestsellers after all returns had been processed. Other than these retrospective reports, a couple of reader- ship surveys done for the Australia Council and some copyright -related research from Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), the available information was largely anecdotal.This all changed in the early 2000s, as some of the $240 million GST compensation package was used to research the industry, and BookTrack (renamed Nielsen BookScan in 2002) entered the Australian market.' (Introduction 81)