News

Reed Exhibitions has cancelled BookExpo Canada, according to press release first publicized on Quillblog. The company has also cancelled the Toronto Book Fair, a consumer book fair in Toronto it announced less than a month ago.

Greg Topalian, a senior vice president at Reed Exhibitions, confirmed the cancellation of the fall fair.

UPDATE: Publishers Weekly, which is owned by Reed, had this to say.

The death of the BookExpo Canada, scheduled for June 19-22 in Toronto, comes after three of Canada's four major publishers said they were pulling out this year. Random House Canada was the first to leave, followed by Penguin Canada and HarperCollins Canada. Only Simon & Schuster Canada said it would take part in the trade show.

Reed was doubly rocked when it subsequently announced the new consumer fair for the fall and was again rebuffed by Random House and Penguin.

Today's release from Reed says its "focus on the publishing industry now centers on our event in New York and we look forward to serving the needs of our customers in North America most effectively with a singular event."

The New York event is BookExpo America. It takes place at the end of May.

HarperCollins and Random House both declined to comment today on the closing of BookExpo Canada.

The consensus among the major publishers was that BookExpo Canada had lost its relevance. It was originally designed to allow publishers to meet booksellers from across the country and sell their upcoming releases. But with the advent of Indigo/Chapters, which sells more than half the books in the country, paying Reed to attend an event to meet independent bookstore owners stopped being worth it.

"It lost that relevance and they never came up with another reason to keep it going," said one insider.

Doing business over the Internet and a change in the selling seasons were also factors. "If you hadn't sold your books by June, you were two months behind."

There is some question as to whether BookExpo America will survive in the long run for the same reasons, the insider said.

But the story is different for small, independent publishers who rely on independent bookstores as much as they do on Indigo. Sarah MacLachlan, president of House of Anansi Press in Toronto, told In Other Words, "It makes me sad.

"Book expo was a real opportunity for an independent Canadian press like ours to meet with booksellers from across the country," MacLachlan said. "It was at Book Expo that we launched writers such as Rawi Hage (IMPAC award winning author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach), and Gil Adamson (author of The Outlander, winner of the Amazon/Books in Canada award, and current Canada Reads contender). Booksellers from across Canada got to meet these new writers, and together with them we built national tours that offered these writers exposure to customers from St John's to Victoria. 

"Book Expo served a vital purpose to the independent booksellers and publishers alike, but was less useful to the bigger multi-nationial publishers and the biggest bookstore chain in the country, Indigo. I hope that the Canadian Booksellers Association will now take the opportunity to mount a new trade fair, a more scaled down version more suitable to the size of the market. We don't need to meet in a convention centre, but I do think that it's vital for us to have some sort of national gathering."

Kim McArthur, president and publisher of McArthur and Co. in Toronto, had a similar reaction:

"I'm sorry to see the end of Book Expo Canada in June. Although all of us publishers realized that it was not a great return on investment in terms of the outlay of cash to mount booths and bring authors in to meet the booksellers, it was the only game in town at the right time of the year to launch our fall lists, and I was always a huge supporter. (Mind you, our booth was always comparatively tiny in comparison to the acreage of the multinational booths, both as Little, Brown Canada and McArthur & Co, and therefore cost less)."

MCArthur had some concrete ideas about what could replace BookExpo. "Here's an ideal substitute for BEC, though.... I've just returned from the ABA Winter Institute in Salt Lake City, where I was signing up a new U.S. publisher (Unbridled Books). The Winter Institute was really impressive -- two days of educational seminars for booksellers, a keynote breakfast with industry leaders (Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, Bob Miller of Hyperion, Nan Graham of Scribners). Participating publishers (all sizes, from the smallest indie to the largest multinational) also had two rounds of 'speed dating' (pitching their spring lists to the 500 booksellers in attendance, going from table to table where the booksellers were sitting).

"Also very impressed by the Author Reception from 6-8 p.m. on Friday night where each participating publisher was allowed to bring two authors to meet the booksellers and sign galleys for them, as we did at BEC. Each participating publisher could also send up to four galleys or advance reading copies to be stored and picked up by booksellers in the galley room. It was terrific. There were a number of Canadian booksellers in Salt Lake City, too... and they all thought the idea of a ‘Summer Institute' in June in Toronto was an excellent one

"Wouldn't it be fantastic if Canadian publishers and booksellers could organize something like this to replace BEC in June? A fraction of the cost, at the right time of year, and all publishers (Canadian and multinational) could participate. I'm all for it, and we still have time to organize it."