A friend of mine is actually on a book tour. Not a virtual Zoom tour at her desk. She's really gone from Toronto to Calgary and Edmonton, maybe elsewhere, promoting her pretty terrific and well-reviewed book, Wanda's War. I had thought the old-fashioned book tour -- Canadian authors hitting indy book stores in other provinces to promote their work to a handful of readers at a time -- was pretty much a dead thing. Glad to see it's not.
Last week SHuSH, the terrific book-trade news Substack by publisher Kenneth Whyte was considering the implications of the likely collapse of Indigo as a book seller, and finding most of the consequences pretty terrible. And indeed the numbers are dire -- Indigo's share of all books sold in physical bookstores in Canada, let alone online, is still pretty substantial.
But the exit of Indigo will surely spur on the already swelling revival of independent bookstores everywhere across the country. Indy bookstores, run by Canadians who love books and curate their stocks according to local tastes, have always been vital in the promotion and hand-selling of Canadian books by Canadian authors. It's pretty likely that the physical bookstore selling physical books is going to survive despite online sellers and e-books and public library e-circulation (none of which I boycott!). And the return of a big broad network of independent booksellers would be a big step in the revival of a Canadian book marketplace friendly to Canadian books. Maybe public policies that support a Canadian writing and publishing industry could even make a bit of a return.
(Update, June 16: The Toronto Star also sees the bright prospects for indy bookstores. Not that they got the idea here -- the story has lots of reporting behind it -- but it's the same idea.)
Today the New Yorker quotes New York Times publisher A.J. Sulzberger talking about how barely a decade ago the Times was losing money and ridiculed for having a paywall. It now has ten million digital subscribers and is thriving. Sulzberger takes the opportunity to condemn "the terrible conventional wisdom of the early Internet that 'information wants to be free.'”If Bill C-18 survives Google's appropriation campaign, maybe even the internet will come around to paid content. Then it will only be Canadian schools and universities and a few aging law professors that are really committed to piracy as a business model they still call "fair dealing." There could yet be a future for writing and publishing in Canada.
