In more weird tax adventures, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs office has decided to reverse course on a notion that standard VAT should be paid on adult coloring books already sold.
The VAT was demanded because, the HMRC said, adult coloring books were often made to have pages pulled out. It was also suggested that adult coloring books were sold “uncompleted”—presumably because the color was missing—and that this too made them vulnerable to higher VAT rates.
Children’s coloring books, by the way, have always been granted the same VAT-free status as other print books in the UK, making it doubly hard for some to accept the idea that adult coloring books shouldn’t have the same favor with taxing authorities.
Bottom line: While adult coloring books are hardly the industry’s greatest moment, they and the EU’s longtime classification of ebooks as “not books” remind us that, in some areas (not just in Europe), authorities can see books and reading as more valuable for raising tax revenue than for what they mean to education, culture, and societies’ development. The onus for this lies on those of us in the industry. In 2017 we’d like to see the publishing community overall do more to communicate and demonstrate its value to the world.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
