How might we measure the value of a locally produced book? Or, in a more collective sense, how might we put a value on a local books and literary sector, one that is distinct from the larger English-language markets of the Northern Hemisphere and attentive to our own regional and cultural ways of being, doing, and belonging? What does value mean in the context of the local book? And on whose terms might it be expressed?

While Australia’s most recent national cultural policy, Revive (2023), promises some much-needed new investment in Australian writers, publishers, and book industry infrastructure, the policy document includes the admission that ‘without high quality data it is difficult to tell the stories of what is happening in the [arts] sector, [to] measure who and what the sector is, [or even to] measure the impact of our creative endeavours’.