No doubt, cost is an issue. Let’s take the final instalment of the Harry Potter series as a case study. When it came out on 21 July 2007, it marked an end of a era, both for me and the legions of Harry Potter fans. But it was the price difference between Malaysia and Australia that shocked me. In Australia the RRP is $49.99, but many people got it for $25. And I’m not talking about Big W either. From international chains like Borders to home-grown QBD, a quick glance showed that the average price of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” went for $25. Sure, there were a scattered reports that small time/independent bookshops refused to stock it, and personally it’s their choice. They do complain about being undercut unfairly by the “big boys”, but little do they know what the big boys are doing in Malaysia.
Borders Malaysia, Times, MPH and gang were selling the book at RM110! It was only after British Tesco and France’s Carrefour slashed the price down to RM69 that the “big boys” boycotted the launch, citing “unfair competition”. Now anywhere else Times/Borders/MPH would be considered “big chains”. So if in Brisbane the small time, independent bookshops are being squeezed by the big chains, in Malaysia the big chains are being squeezed by the hypermarts. I think I can see a food chain here.
The AUD was 2.9 to the RM at July 2007. Even if we take the AUD today, stubbornly high as it is, A$30 only equates to RM90. RM120?! Madness. Tesco and Carrefour was right: RM70 is about A$23. How do Borders/Times/MPH get away with it?!
And to put things in perspective, in a country where $10/hour is the minimum wage, one only has to work for 3 hours to earn enough dough for the last Harry Potter book. In Malaysia, and speaking from experience, you’d be lucky to earn RM2/hour. So one would have to work for 35 hours, or if you work 8 hour days, about 4 days before you would even get enough dough to meet what Tesco/ Carrefour is asking for. At RM120, it’d be a whole weeks work before you have enough dough to buy it.
Now lets not get into the relative purchasing power/high labour cost/Big Mac index/exchange rate argument. Exchange rate makes very little difference. J. K. Rowling is guaranteed a market. They printed something like 10 million books just for the global launch day alone. We’re not exactly talking about a supply problem are we? And the fact is, no matter how you do the math, A$30 != RM120.
Another one factor that has been missed by them “commentators” and so-called “social experts” is language. The problem with Malaysia is that we have way too many languages. After being in Australia and New Zealand, I now know why Malaysian advertisements don’t make sense: its because they don’t talk much.
Admittedly, advertising in Malaysia is a nightmare even for Saatchi and Saatchi . You can’t have advertisements in only one language, unless you’re targeting a specific market. You need them in BM because it is the national language and they are the majority. You need it in Mandarin/Cantonese because they are the ones who control the economy. You need it in English because they (generally) are the ones with the highest purchasing power. Marketing your product in only one language in Malaysia is nothing but economic suicide.
However, the 成语 used in the many Taiwanese advertisements I see would flop badly when translated into English. The puns in English aren’t exactly replicable in 华语. And I’m still amazed that Sunsilk managed to sell shampoo, considering that some of their BM advertisements don’t show much hair. That is the root of my point: to get the message across a wide linguistic spectrum, and be able to reuse the same footage, they have to go down to the lowest common denominator. Which means using simple, basic language, be it English, Malay, Mandarin etc. and without the attention grabbing bits that are tied to a specific language, our advertisements aren’t exactly the best in the world. Oh sure, there are some good ones, but on the same vein, there is someone out there with a IQ of 300, but what is one person over 25 million people?
Its surprisingly hard to find anime girls that are reading that's not Yuki
Then you have BM. No doubt, there are some good BM books out there, and I take my hat of to A. Samad Said, but the collective pool of 18 million Malay’s in Malaysia cannot compare with the potential talent of 中港台, with 1.3 billion, 7 million and 22 million people respectively. Even if we included Indonesia, it’s still a small pool compared with the 400 million English speakers worldwide. So BM books tend to be a bit thin on the ground.
Then there’s English, with the costs, and the fact that not many people (or not enough people numerically) can read English fluently. I know, I know, it works both ways. I can’t digest 兵法 in 华语, and I don’t expect the Chinese educated to read Harry Potter in English. But you want, and need to, have access to English books, but it seems like everything is against you.
This, I see, is the biggest problem with a multi-lingual society. Need BM, but there is not enough content and people to make up a market. Need English, but not enough people competent in it and dough. Lobby for Mandarin, but only a small minority understands it well. So what do you get? A society who literary can’t understand each other enough.
And this is why people don’t read. Cost and language holds them back. Even if you say newspapers are cheap, they can’t understand English, BM newspapers are essentially UMNO press releases, and Chinese papers can’t see beyond their noses and China. Malay’s read Kosmo and Harian Metro, because that is their only thing they can digest. Chinese read their sensationalist tabloids
So what do we get? A generation brought up reading tabloids/gossip magazines/EPL tables/their own narrow minded world. And thanks to a quota system, one half is roped in to go to UPM/UUM/UiTM and gang. The other half, thanks to MCA, goes to UTAR/TARC/Southern college. The result? A nation of morons who literary can’t communicate with each other.
And when people don’t communicate, it is the perfect breeding ground for mistrust and ignorance.
