There are few doubters left among Canadian publishers. Nearly everyone is digitizing as fast as they can, preparing for e-book demand in whatever form or forms it will come in.
At the moment, the form it is not taking is the Kindle. Canadians were mystified and annoyed when Amazon recently began selling its e-reading device in about 100 countries—but not Canada. Amazon has not explained why. Spokesman Andrew Herdener would only say that the company was “working on it,” but he could not give a time line for when the Kindle would be available in Canada. The Sony Reader is sold in Canada, but a new wireless version is not available yet either. One popular theory is that negotiations with telecommunications companies are holding up the show, but most people expect a breakthrough soon.
Lisa Charters, Random House of Canada’s senior vice president, director digital, says Canadians’ disappointment about having to wait for the Kindle is a clear indication that there is pentup demand: “My prediction is that 2010 could see the Canadian market catch up to the American market very quickly in its e-book sales with an Amazon Kindle and potentially an iTablet.” Publishers frequently refer to the Kindle as a game changer in Canada, but if Apple releases an iTablet, rumored to resemble an iPhone with a touch screen and full color but in the size of a hardcover book, that could change the game again.
Meanwhile, Canadians have a homegrown option for buying e-books. In February, Canada’s biggest book retail chain, Indigo Books & Music, launched its online e-book store, Shortcovers. There is no Shortcovers device. E-books are sold and downloaded primarily to mobile and portable devices, including the iPhone, Blackberry, the new Palm Pre, Android phones, as well as laptops and netbooks. “All of this comes from a philosophical stance for us, and that is that you should be able to take the books that you buy with you anywhere you want to go to any device that you want to use,” says Michael Tamblyn, vice president of content, sales and merchandising. “You should never be tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. And [we know] that devices you use and that you prefer are going to change over time.”
Tamblyn says nearly 1,000 publishers from Canada, the U.S., and abroad are providing e-books to Shortcovers. “We’ve been picking up some momentum and seeing some fantastic growth in this sector of the industry, probably the most interesting part of which is the international scale of the sales we are seeing. Between 55% and 60% of sales are in the U.S., 25% in Canada, and then around 15% for the rest of the world on English-language e-books,” he says.
Steve Osgoode, HarperCollins Canada’s director of digital marketing and business development, has been working closely with Sony as well as Shortcovers. Digital “still is, as you can imagine, a relatively small percentage of our business, but it is one that is growing. I think our results are very consistent, certainly consistent with what we’ve seen with our colleagues in the U.S,” he says. “We’re seeing tremendous growth month over month—it’s like 17% in the last four or five months.”
But the emphasis shouldn’t just be on e-books, says Random House of Canada’s Charters. “Digitization of our books does provide us with not just e-books but also the ability to have them browsable and searchable and readable in an online format, so that people can find these books and buy them in the stores or wherever they buy them,” she says. Digitization is also a powerful tool for marketing physical books, she notes.
Random House of Canada has been converting all its frontlist books, striving to launch them at the same time as the print version, and working its way through the backlist titles using the EPub standard, Charters says. Other publishers are also using formats such as PDF and XML, but Charters hopes EPub will be the one that will prevail. “This is a significant investment, so what we need are standards, and we need standards in all kinds of ways to make sure we can move this stuff through without costing us a fortune and taking us a lot of time. So having a standard [e-book] format for the entire industry is, I think, critical to the future of e-book sales,” she says.
Michael Smith of the International Digital Publishing Forum, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that developed the EPub standard and maintains it, says publishers in Canada are eager to learn about EPub, and there was a good turnout for an EPub book camp, sponsored by the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP) and BookNet Canada. “A number of the publishers, through the ACP, have kind of banded together and identified EPub as a standard they wanted to do, and they realized they were able to get a slightly better negotiating position with conversion houses or distributors by packaging a group of the publishers together.”
Beyond the technical questions, a larger one looms. “What’s the right price?” Random House of Canada’s CEO Brad Martin asks rhetorically. “My first answer would be that the right price would be based on the first edition’s suggested retail from the publisher,” he says. “There’s a premium to be paid for reading when it first comes out as opposed to when the paperback edition is available.” He warns that the $9.99 price could destroy the hardcover business model.
“I think there’s no question people will read on their devices and they will read electronic books. That’s coming, so how do we maintain value? That is the challenge,” says House of Anansi Press president Sarah MacLachlan. “What we seem to be seeing is that $10 is the magic price. But how do you pay a writer royalties? How do you pay for the cost of digitizing?... Coming up with that pricing paradigm is the challenge,” she says.
