Madam, - Good luck to Waterford IT in its campaign to achieve university status. However as book publishers, can we ask that they do not include in the enabling Act an anachronistic tax on books?
Following a tradition that goes back to early 18th-century English law, Irish publishers are obliged to deliver, at their own expense, free copies of every book they publish to various national and university libraries. For each new university a me-too clause has been casually added to the establishing Bill increasing the number. As a result the number of free copies demanded from Irish publishers - now 13 - is greater than for any other publishing group in the EU, except the Greeks.
Among these are five free copies to British libraries. Admittedly, reciprocation provides Trinity College with a healthy stream of British-published books.
We have no quarrel with the general principle of supporting scholarship in this way. But it is difficult to see why in that cause A.& A. Farmar received some time ago peremptory demands from NUI Maynooth and Limerick University for copies of the annual wine guide, The Best of Wine in Ireland.
And in these days of inter-library loans, does scholarship really demand five complete collections of Irish published books in the Dublin area (The National Library, Trinity, UCD, DCU and Maynooth)?
Hard-pressed Irish publishers would be grateful to the drafters of the Waterford University Bill if they could omit this vexatious and unusual method of taxation. - Yours, etc,
TONY FARMAR, President, Clé, The Irish Book Publishers Association, Ranelagh Village, Dublin 6.