The Latest on Writing and Publishing in Canada
BOOKSELLERS | BOOK STATS | PIRACY | PUBLISHERS | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BOOKSELLERS
Indigo Goes Private
It is expected that the buyout offer from Trilogy Investments and Trilogy Retail Holdings for the Indigo Books & Music chain will be approved, and the big-box bookstore’s stock will have been delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange. Indigo has struggled to succeed as a public company, seeing falling stock values over time, and a vicious cyber-attack that affected revenues during the pandemic. Trilogy Investments, owned by Gerald Schwartz, is expected to return complete control of the company to founder Heather Reisman, who recently returned as CEO. Reisman and Schwartz are married and are prominent philanthropists in Toronto.
BOOK STATS
Statistics Canada Showing Successful Post-Covid Market Rebound for Books
Recent figures from Statistics Canada show the commercial writing and publishing industry in Canada has recovered and has now surpassed pre-pandemic sales and growth numbers. Total book sales for 2022 (the last year for which StatsCan has complete reports) beat the previous high, from 2018, to reach $998.3 million. What’s more, 52.8 percent of the books sold in Canada in 2022 were written by Canadian authors, the second year in a row domestic authors captured the majority of the market. While excellent news on the commercial front, the Canadian book sector has yet to recover from the failure of its educational market.
Majority of Canadian Readers Accessing Books for Free
According to a recent Booknet Canada study on leisure time activities for Canadians, the book industry in this country has a new challenge. For the first time ever in their studies, Booknet found that “readers across all formats were acquiring books from free sources more than from paid sources.” While public library access continues to be one of the most-used free sources for print, audio, and ebooks, the trend toward free access undoubtedly also includes illegal sources that cut author royalty completely out of the picture. Combined with other BookNet findings showing falling dollar totals for Canada’s greatest buyers of books, this adds yet another economic stressor to a sector that has struggled against unauthorized access for decades.
PIRACY
Multinational Education Firms Sue Google Over Pirate Advertisements
Four of the most powerful educational publishers in the world have filed a U.S. lawsuit claiming damages from thousands of advertisements displayed by search giant Google that the publishers claim point to pirated versions of their products. Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, and McGraw Hill have partnered on the legal action and assert their good-faith attempts to have Google remove the ads have been ignored. Supporters of the lawsuit have stressed the vulnerability of students in a pirate marketplace, noting the risk of credit card fraud and failure to deliver purchased pirated materials. The U.S. educational-materials market is estimated at $8.3 billion, while Google earns upwards of $300 billion annually from advertising.
PUBLISHERS
University of Toronto Press Seeking Larger Market for Commercial Nonfiction
With the expansion of its Aevo trade nonfiction imprint from five books to 15 per year, University of Toronto Press (UTP) appears to be taking aim at commercial nonfiction as a support for its core academic business. UTP has gathered a twelve-member volunteer advisory board to consider proposals and push the commercial work forward. Of course, The Writers’ Union will carefully monitor contract practices in the commercial market during this expansion. Academic contracts and commercial contracts traditionally differ on extended copyright control.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Firms Lobbying to Use Published Work for Free
In the six months ending June 2024, Toronto-based company Cohere, a developer of large language models that underlie artificial intelligence, met at least a dozen times with highly placed officials in Ottawa. Cohere is among the AI-sector firms calling on Canada to amend the Copyright Act with a new exception for free and unauthorized use of text and data in the further development of AI. Google Canada has had 23 such meetings in the same time period, though perhaps not all centered on artificial intelligence. While Canada’s cultural sector organizations have delivered a consistent recommendation that Canada allow a valuable rights market for AI-development to develop and grow, it’s clear we are up against a very active and well-funded tech lobby determined to further weaken workers’ rights in Canada.
