Indonesia: Not Too Clever
I have just been billed Indonesian customs duty of 66% on a review copy of an academic book mailed from a UK publishing house. This hasn’t usually happened with review copies, though it often bedevils shipments of panama hats, ivory shaving kits and monogrammed shoe-trees. My guess is that the neanderthals at Soekarno-Hatta have decided to tighten customs this month to appease the new head of tax collection, who is replacing a man that allowed an employee to steal $10 million. (So you can now only bring one bottle of scotch from abroad instead of the usual two, for example).
Several questions arise: why is Indonesia taxing educational inputs, and why are the taxes so preposterous? It is not as if there is any local industry to protect. Indonesia is not a publishing superpower. The country publishes around 4,000 books a year, fewer than Sri Lanka—a nation less than a tenth of Indonesia’s size. Most of them are translations into Indonesian and not especially good. The country should be welcoming books from overseas, which after all are a sign, however tenuous, that its citizens can read.
If one can arrange it, this is yet another lesson to have everything routed via Singapore.
