Untapped Potential: the Australian Literary Heritage Project

October 4, 2024 11:26 PM

Not only has Untapped Potential set up an independent publishing imprint and rescued 161 previously lost Australian books in the last four years bringing them to libraries across Australia, the research team also used the data generated throughout the process to help answer important research questions that couldn’t be answered otherwise. Their findings (PDF) have just been released.

By taking on the role of publisher, Untapped also created an
unusual but elegant vehicle for testing four important research
questions which have previously proved very tricky to test
empirically:

1. To what extent, if any, does the introduction of e-lending
cannibalise or feed book sales?
2. What are the relationships between library promotional
activities and book loans and sales?
3. To what extent do out of print Australian titles have economic
value that is currently being left on the table?
4. What challenges do authors face, if any, when they seek to
revert their rights?

Some of the results:

• There was substantial public demand to borrow these titles
• There was substantial public demand to purchase these titles
• There was no evidence that e-lending cannibalised book sales (and some evidence it may actually have increased them)
• The Untapped project generated around $120,000 in additional income for authors in the project’s first 12 months. All participants received ebook royalties from retail sales and library licensing.
• Libraries and publishers could both benefit from library control of e-lending infrastructure

posted by mosessis (7 comments total)

Sending this to an author friend who lives in Melbourne, thanks!
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:47 AM on October 5

Lots of well-known authors (by Oz standards) in their list, and several titles I recognised. I remember David Foster's Plumbum making a splash at the time, and after reading an old review of it I now want to read it. I own (and recommend) Cassandra Pybus's Gross Moral Turpitude.

A worthy effort, which addresses that vast gap between public domain works and newer works still in print. Seeing as they include some kids books, I recommend they have a go at Osmar White's The Super-roo of Mungalongaloo and its sequels.

Shame it can't include the untapped potential of young Australian authors who tried to get their novel published but didn't quite manage it. ;)
posted by rory at 2:13 AM on October 5 [4 favorites]

"We have worked with Australian authors, literary agents and estates to obtain the rights and digitise 161 culturally important out-of-print novels, histories, memoirs, poetry and more." How incredible! 161 authors who might have faded into obscurity and been forgotten instead with the potential to be remembered, in support of the open citation access advantage [1, 2]. All the more incredible we're also talking about some well known authors. I do wonder what the effect is for the non-heavy hitters, or even just not-Garry Disher (66% of sales from the collection).

It is cool that the big loan books were the big sales books.
posted by rubatan at 2:25 AM on October 5 [1 favorite]

Brilliant—the Untapped ebook of Plumbum is available on Kindle on amazon.co.uk at a reasonable price, as is Gross Moral Turpitude. So these aren't just restricted to the Australian market.
posted by rory at 2:29 AM on October 5 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this post! What an excellent project to learn about. Just thinking about all the time and effort it took for authors, agents, and publishers to untangle and confirm the rights reversions is a lot! It's heartening to hear about the findings, too.

I enjoyed browsing through the AustLit digitial exhibition pages; really neat to see original covers (and click through to the publication histories).
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:12 AM on October 5

We used sophisticated scanning methods to copy the print book, then applied OCR to convert the text. After that, we used dedicated proof readers to pick up any errors and make sure the scan is of library quality. For that proofreading work, our focus was on hiring arts workers affected by COVID.

So lovely! Libraries are the BEST
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:20 AM on October 5

Spotlighting a title that caught my eye:

"Leave to Remain is Abbas El-Zein's award-winning memoir of his youth in Lebanon and his years of travel between the Arab and Western worlds. It is powerful and poetic, passionate and elegiac, a clear-eyed and heartfelt examination of the forces that have shaped both his own life and a great deal of ancient and recent history.

In Leave to Remain, El-Zein tells his story of growing up in civil-war Beirut, a city in the throes of self-destruction, yet obstinately clinging to its cosmopolitan past. El-Zein traces the genesis of a contemporary Middle Eastern identity – his own – under the influence of culture, religion, history and places far removed from where he grew up: Najaf and Baghdad, Paris, Palestine, London, Sydney and the American Far West. With him we travel through a Middle-Eastern life with an eye on the mundane and the everyday, as well as the cataclysmic events overshadowing them – from the adventures of an ancestor fleeing Ottoman armies during the Napoleonic wars to the trans-national world of Islamic scholarship in which his grandfathers lived, from the Israeli invasions of Lebanon to the Iraq war and the post-September 11 world of today. Leave to Remain is a story of a troubled homeland, of many departures and less-than-happy returns – an autobiographical reflection on today’s Arab world and its relationship with the West."
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 10:20 AM on October 5 [1 favorite]