From food and rent to clothing and everyday household items, pretty much every consumer good in Canada has had rapid price increases in recent years. Every good except one.
“I think what’s plaguing all of us is that the price of everything has just about doubled—except the price of a book,” says Alana Wilcox, president of the Association of Canadian Publishers and editorial director at Coach House Books. This is a problem for independent publishers, whose margins are already tight and are being squeezed by the rising cost of paper, shipping, and staffing.
But trying to convince consumers to pay more for books is difficult, Wilcox acknowledges. “If you go to the Park Hyatt in Toronto, it is exactly the same price for one cocktail as it is for a book. And people have no problem paying that. It’s a question of how we advertise the value of a book.”
Jack Illingworth, ACP’s executive director, concurs. “When I started my career over 20 years ago, the price of a trade paperback was C$19.95,” he says. “Now it might be C$22.95. It has barely moved.” The result, he says, is a situation in which any increases in government funding to the sector go to cover the shortfall. “There is a feeling in the industry that something has to give at some point,” he adds.
Wilcox similarly bemoans the skyrocketing costs of doing business, singling out venue charges for book launches and other events as a particular source of pain. The cost of renting a venue for a single night is often greater now than a typical author’s advance. Add to that the price of hotels, which in Toronto run in the neighborhood of C$500 a night, and it becomes prohibitively expensive to bring in out-of-town authors for events and appearances. “I don’t know about other cities,” Wilcox says. “That may be a Toronto problem, but it is an issue.”
It is not, of course, the only issue independent publishers in Canada are struggling with. Problems thrown up around the Copyright Modernization Act, passed in 2012—specifically an expansion of the fair-dealing provision to include the educational sector, which has resulted in a loss of royalties to publishers that the Access Copyright collection agency estimates to be in excess of C$200 million—persist. Illingworth remains hopeful that this matter will be addressed under the current Liberal government, though there will be a federal election in the next year or so.
Creators’ rights may also be affected by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. “AI is huge,” Wilcox says. “We’re working on trying to figure out what all the legal implications of it are. We’ve helped members with wording in contracts, that kind of thing.”
Illingworth suggests that there is not across-the-board agreement on the part of Canadian independent publishers about how to deal with the problems posed by AI. He calls the unauthorized scraping of publishers copyrighted works in the Books3 data set, which is used to train generative AI models, “a wake-up call” for the industry. “We’re working closely with our international colleagues through the International Publishers Association to attempt to address these issues strategically on a global scale,” he adds.
There have also been some promising developments for Canadian publishers, however. Illingworth notes an improved relationship with Indigo since the return of Heather Reisman as CEO in September 2023. And in its April federal budget, the Liberal party delivered a modest increase of $10 million over three years to the Canada Book Fund. While this fell well short of the $19.2 million per year the government had pledged in 2021, it was nevertheless welcome.
Wilcox notes the opening of new bookstores across the country, as well as the appearance of new publishers like Stonehewer Books in B.C. and Assembly Press in Ontario, as signs of a healthy sector. “There’s a lot of vibrancy on that level,” she says.
Steven W. Beattie is a writer and critic in Stratford, Ontario. He runs the literary website That Shakespearean Rag.
