Amid concern that official indifference to the plague of pirated text books will allow the practice to persist and in the face of the unrelenting assault from pirates, Lloyd Austin, proprietor of Austin’s Bookstore, the city’s largest, has had to effect still more cuts to orders for text books.
“Unfortunately we have had to institute more cuts in the volume of school texts that we have ordered this year and I’m afraid that some of those buyers who have a preference for original published texts will be disappointed. We have no choice,” Austin told Stabroek Business.
The practice of acquiring and illegally copying and selling published texts has become a multi-million-dollar business in Guyana and it is widely believed that its persistence has been a function of official indifference to the practice. Under the previous Education Minister, Shaik Baksh, the government had also been accused of distributing illegally copied text books to schools.
Austin said he had noted that the verbal position taken by current Education Minister Priya Manickchand suggested that she would not support the pirating of text books. “The challenge of course is for the government to take the kind of action necessary to send a definitive message to the pirates,” Austin said.
Austin told Stabroek Business that the steady growth in the book pirating industry had hindered the legitimate book-selling industry to a point where, as businesses, those enterprises needed to look for options. “I am aware that tens of millions of dollars worth of school texts are being held here in Guyana because they have not been sold. In some cases, the second edition has caught up with the first one,” he said.
Meanwhile Austin told Stabroek Business that while some publishers had commenced legal action against book pirates more than two years ago, the case was yet to reach the courts, a circumstance which he attributed to the tardiness of the publishers’ attorneys.
Asserting that it was unlikely that the situation will change in the foreseeable future, Austin told Stabroek Business that apart from buying fewer school texts he had also moved to increase his stock of children’s books and general interest reading. “Women and children are the biggest buyers of books and we are aiming to target that market,” he said. In order to sustain his enterprise, he had also moved to strengthen the fiction and stationery departments in his store.
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Meanwhile Austin has criticized the practice of sole bidding by government for text books and said that orders for text books by the Ministry of Education should be done by competitive bidding. “Apart from the desirability of publicly advertising these tenders, everyone should be given the opportunity to bid. Competitive tendering not only makes for greater transparency, it also puts government in a much better position to get value for money,” Austin said.
