Mr. Liam Donnelly:

To be bluntly honest, there is a cartel in Ireland for Irish primary and secondary-school textbooks. Five major publishers run it. They give the same discounts, returns terms and price increases. I can almost guarantee the price will increase by 5% every January. We left the textbook business 35 years ago, but I have experienced, when working with Easons and running its textbook division, that the same problems occur all of the time. The cartel - I am sorry to say - I think is between Gill, CJ Fallon, Edco and Folens. There is another one I have forgotten. They run it the same way. There are price increases every year. They change their text books every two or three years, sometimes as a basis of curriculum change, but often not. Sometimes, it is just because they can. I have never understood why they were allowed to run it like this.

Easons, to be fair, is the main supplier of textbooks in the country. Most bookshops cannot afford to do them. The discount is 25%. There is a 5% returns cap, which means that if one buys €100 worth of books and sell €50 worth, one can only return 5% and is still stuck with 50%. One has €45 worth of books in the shop that one can never sell. The publishers might change the following year and the textbook will be different. They run it that way and it is very difficult to make money. Easons is the only one that has really made a good fist of it. Some small shops are able to do it and, certainly, textbooks.iehas done a fantastic job of it online. However, the changing over of textbooks is a real issue, not just in Irish. It does not matter what the subject is. That is probably beyond the purview of this committee. I find it problematic how those publishers run their business.

Every bookshop has stock sitting on the shelf for years. With regard to Irish books, we never return books to the Irish publishers, especially not to ÁIS. We buy them and we have them. After two or three years, accounting wise, they mean nothing. They have been written off. I would sell them off cheap and get in new books. We will price promote to sell the stock on. Eventually, you will find it for €1 in a bargain bin. It will go and we will never buy it again. We might not be able to identify it, of course, because it would not have an ISBN, but we can then buy fresh stock.

We will always keep our core Irish stock in place.

Some books of poetry by obscure poets, or very badly-produced books, just die. The good ones, however, keep on selling, which is always encouraging. The reason we stock the books is that they are good, especially in children's publishing. It is fantastic. Futa Fata does fantastic work. Many of the mainstream Irish publishers, such as Gill, do some great books as Gaeilge, which we never return. However, there is a real issue in adult publishing with bad books that people do not want to buy but we buy them because we do not know. We have never read them. We do not get a chance to read every book. One has to make a judgment and we buy one or two. If they do not sell, they do not sell.

We do not sell e-books. That is not our business. We are in the physical domain. However, it is a cost issue for a publisher. Producing a CD is very expensive. Possibly the best avenue for publishers to release their material is through Audible or on the Internet, in order that it can be downloaded onto a USB stick, but not as a physical CD. It is just too expensive to do it. As Gráinne Ní Mhuilneoir said, many of the translations that are coming up are done by robots.

It is like many Irish texts one will find on the Internet if one looks for obscure, old Irish texts. They are produced by photocopying machines. They are terrible and they do the book industry a disservice. It is very important that they should be produced and people should be assisted in providing the readers and making it happen, but not as a physical CD. They should be produced via Audible, or through an Irish-language service for books as Gaeilge, in order that they do not get lost in the morass of English.