e-books in Canada

Well, it had to happen. What goes around comes around. It was announced this week that The Doubleday Book Club (http://www.doubledaybookclub.com) and The Literary Guild (http://www.literaryguild.com) have purchased their second e-book to bring to print as a Featured Alternate Selection. The book is "The Secrets of Our Success - How to Publish and Promote Online" by MJ Rose (ParisPoet@aol.com) and Angela Adair-Hoy (aadair@writersmarkets.com). Now people reading p-books will get an introduction to e-books. I wonder what the price will be. Will it be the same or more? Will the price of the electronic edition go up so as to not compete with the print edition? Have to keep my eye on that.

Some happenings north of the border. There are now two Canadian e-publishers - that I know of anyway - if there are more, let me know. LTDBooks (http://ltdbooks.com) and Editio-books (http://www.editio-books.com), I hope to do indepth profiles on these two in the next couple of weeks. The reason is that Chapters, the largest chain of bookstores in Canada has announced that they will be selling electronic books starting sometime in February. The reason for this emphasis is that the copyright laws in Canada are unusual.

Canadian bookstores must buy books from Canadian suppliers, even foreign books, if the Canadian supplier has an exclusive agreement with the foreign publisher to distribute their books in Canada. They can not legally buy a book from Ingram or Baker and Taylor if a Canadian publisher is the Canadian distributor of that book. It gets a little complicated for Canadian bookstores because these contractual agreements expire and are picked up by other publishers. The Canadian magazine, The Quill and Quire, actually publishes a guide twice a year so that Canadian booksellers can find out where to order their books. This has it advantages and disadvantages to the bookseller. The advantage is that booksellers in Canada have a larger selection of books to choose from all over the world. The disadvantage is that, unlike the US, Canadian booksellers have fewer places they can order a title. At this point in time there are no national wholesalers in Canada, only regional ones and their inventories are not what Ingram and Baker and Taylor can offer.

What has this got to do with e-books and e-book publishers? Well, if Canadian publishers start to get interested in e-books and start signing up e-publishers for distribution rights in Canada, what will this do to the industry up here? If McClelland and Stewart or General Publishing sign up a significant number of American or British e-publishers, will bookstores, like Chapters have to download the book from the Canadian distributor? This might be a good thing for a couple of reasons. Canadian publishers send their sales reps all over the country several times a year, to bookfairs and conventions and individual bookstores. This will give e-books wide exposure. It will not be an easy sell though, Canadian booksellers still remember the fiasco of the Sony Bookman and books on tape never took off in Canada. It seems to be a pretty paper oriented reading populous but who knows. As I said in my first article, this will not be a consumer driven industry.

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