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‘It was the year of the Beatles / It was the year of the Stones . . .” Actually, no. With apologies to Paul Simon, it was the year J.K. Rowling published the seventh and final instalment of her phenomenally popular Harry Potter series of novels, and post-publication outed one of its most beloved characters, Albus Dumbledore. It was the year Australian writer Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, a largely unheralded self-help book, came to dominate the North American non-fiction bestseller lists; when veteran Canadian author Elizabeth Hay got to take home the $40,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel Late Nights on Air; and when another seasoned vet, 65-year-old Don McKay, won the $50,000 Griffin Canadian Poetry Prize.
In any other 12-month span, such successes would have had pride of place in the year-end survey of highlights for the Canadian book industry. But 2007 was not an annus mediocris, or, to be more precise, its final six months were not, “thanks” to the rapid ascent in the value of the Canadian loonie relative to the U.S. greenback.
Previously, when the Canadian dollar was worth, say, 75 cents (U.S.), book buyers here grudgingly tolerated the 20-to 40-per-cent difference between the American price for a novel originating in the United States and the retail cost of the same book imported into Canada. But as the Canadian dollar climbed in value and eventually overtook its U.S. counterpart – in early November it briefly rose to $1.10 – bleats were heard from consumers about the wide discrepancies between the suggested Canadian and U.S. prices printed on the dust jackets of the imports.
“In short order, the big theme within the industry was all about pricing,” one publishing maven recently observed. “You couldn't talk to a bookseller or publisher without suddenly becoming a currency trader.”
Top of the heap
(Rankings are built from the BookNet Canada SalesData aggregate which does not include online sales or pre-sales)
1. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (Simon & Schuster)
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (Raincoast Books)
3. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards (Penguin Group [Canada])
4. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin Group [Canada])
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini (Penguin Group [Canada])
TOP FIVE CANADIAN-AUTHORED TITLES IN 2007
1. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, by Vincent Lam (Doubleday Canada)
2. The Birth House, Ami McKay (Knopf Canada)
3. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (Little Brown & Co.;
first published in 2005)
4. Love You Forever, Robert Munsch (Firefly Books; first published in 1986)
5. Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O’Neill (HarperCollins Canada)
Source: BookNet Canada,
December, 2007
-- James Adams
Even federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty got in on the issue in late October when he complained at a news conference that he had to pay $36 to an Ottawa retailer for his copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when that same title (but not the same book: The Canadian edition was published by Vancouver-based Raincoast Books in partnership with Britain's Bloomsbury, whereas the U.S. edition originated with Scholastic) could be had for $26.74 south of the border.
Publishing and retail organizations tried to explain the discrepancies – “Book prices are set six months to a year before that book arrives in stores;” “Book prices have been coming down and will come down even more. Just wait;” and “The Canadian market is only one-10th the size of the market in the U.S. and as such America has better economies of scale.”
But this didn't quell what came to be dubbed “book rage” as reports circulated in the media of irate customers hurling tomes at bookstore staff.
(The staff could blow it back, verbally at least, with similar gusto. Said one Indigo employee on Facebook: “What [bleeping] world do you think you live in where you can go into a place of business, demand to pay the price charged in a foreign country, insist the company sell you a product for less than it paid for it, verbally abuse the staff, then buy it anyway because guess what? YOU WANT IT.”)
By mid-November, notes Michael Tamblyn, president of BookNet Canada, the country's pre-eminent sales tracker, “publishers and retailers were experimenting in earnest in different ways to maintain the attention of consumers.” The fear (and motivation), of course, was that as the crucial Christmas season drew nigh, Canucks would bypass the True North's retail regime entirely to engage in massive cross-border shopping or to place orders for books directly from U.S. suppliers via the Internet.
As of this week, the patchwork quilt of pricing gambits adopted by individual publishers and booksellers along with the cooling-down of the Canadian dollar (in recent days it hovered around par) seem to have had a calming effect. The expectation is that Canadians likely will have bought as many books as they did in previous Christmas seasons; however, publishers, wholesalers and retailers will probably notice a drop in their 2008 revenue relative to 2007 as a result of their price-cutting on U.S.-originated titles. A clearer picture will only emerge in February or March, once stores return to publishers the leftover inventory from the Christmas rush.
Another topic that generated considerable conversation this year pertained to the spectre of digital publishing. Much of the chatter revolved around Amazon.com's introduction last month of the Kindle, a wireless, handheld electronic reading device with adjustable font controls, massive storage capability and access to 90,000 digitized titles (with front-list “books” selling for about $10 each). There have, of course, been e-books before – most notably the Sony Reader, introduced in 2006 – but consumers complained about the early models' readability, clunkiness and the inconvenience of having to download first onto a computer, then transfer the content to the e-book.
Still, there's this feeling that, sooner rather than later, something like the Kindle is going to make a considerable dent in the paper-and-ink book market. The battle, initially, is going to be fought mostly in the U.S. (Sony Reader and Kindle are for sale only in that country). Canada, with its more modest and thinly distributed market, “is more or less out of the discussion for the time being,” notes BookNet's Tamblyn, adding: “But it's still on the mind of most publishers in the Canadian market. How will we respond to a change in the way people read and a change in the way content is delivered? [The Kindle] is part of a constant drumbeat of both innovation and speculation about what the future might look like.”
If the e-book does become more user-friendly and popular, it will entirely change how the reading business functions. Publishers will have to pore through authors' contracts to determine what electronic rights they have or may want to get. A company like Amazon will have to deal simultaneously with print-and-ink publishers like Random House of Canada and electronic networks like Bell Canada and Telus. Lawyers will squabble over copyright regimes. Warehouses will shrink. Indigo Books and Music will have to ponder how many of its roughly 270 stores should be either closed or “repurposed.” Will there be a role for advertisers in keeping the cost of e-texts down?
These scenarios likely won't be entertained for another three or four years. In the meantime, a conventional publisher like Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada, can take justifiable pride in the sales success of one of its “conventional” books, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. That collection of 12 linked short stories, by Toronto emergency-room physician Vincent Lam, was ranked as the top-selling Canadian-authored title of 2007 by BookNet this week. According to Doubleday's calculations, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada in 2007.
What makes the feat particularly impressive is that Lam's book, his first, has been in stores for almost two years. It was originally published as a $29.95 hardcover in January, 2006, and then, after being named to the Scotiabank Giller Prize long list that September, Doubleday wisely decided to reissue it as an affordable ($17.95) trade paperback under its Anchor imprint. Sales grew and then really took off in November once Bloodletting took last year's Giller, totalling about 120,000 copies by the end of 2006.
Meanwhile, in April, Life of Pi creator Yann Martel began his gambit of sending Prime Minister Stephen Harper a free book every two weeks to encourage the PM to find “stillness” in his busy schedule and, with it, an appreciation of the arts. By year's end the Prime Minister's Office had a pretty good collection on its hands – 21 titles, including three illustrated books, The Brothers Lionheart, Imagine a Day and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, that Martel sent on Christmas Eve.
