Keller, who is the executive editor of the Times, was writing tongue-in-cheek, but he’s also correct. Everyone, it seems, wants to write a book. Doctors do, lawyers do, and Indian Chiefs do—more than most occupations, actually. The motives can be wildly various: some want to tell a story, some want to tell their story, the fools think they can get rich, others want to proselytize ideas or products; the lunatics just believe they’re right and you’re wrong, and want you to know it. Writers on book tours hear about it endlessly from people who think they have something to say and want to be told what the shortcuts and tricks are.

Yet in a surprisingly large percentage of wannabes, there’s an underlying motive that’s identical. They want to take a crack at Western Civilization’s most difficult cognitive act: what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, long form thinking.

Until fairly recently, long form thinking was also among our civilization’s most prestigious activities. That it has ceased to be is a problem I’d have to write a book to explain, but the reality of the desire is beyond dispute and its implications offer a possible solution to the problems that are making book publishers crazy.

Much of what books used to do has been subsumed by other media through the 20th century, and many of them are done better (or at least more accessibly) by newer media. Story-telling and complex fictions have now been done better by both television and film, because those media transmit emotional nuance with greater economy and often with greater complexity. That neither pulp fiction publishers or the publishers of “quality” literary fiction have recognized this is more a matter of them clinging to the idea that people are somehow elevated by having their noses in a book, even if it’s a Harlequin romance or a formula thriller. But the truth is that housewives might be better off watching a soap opera than reading a Harlequin, if for no other reason than that they can fold laundry while they’re watching. It’s a little harder to make the same argument for a thriller. Maybe they can clean their guns or play with their testicles, and thus be less likely to beat up their wives out of frustration.

This is a roundabout way of suggesting that long form thinking, not fiction, is the true achievement of book publishing. That it might evolve into its primary purpose, cultural and economically, is a possibility that book publishers might want to take seriously.

.

July 26, 2011,  500 words

About a decade ago, at the end of a particularly stultifying Annual General Meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada, I suggested to a fairly large group of members that the organization should disband itself.

My suggestion was greeted with stony glares, but I hadn’t made it simply to be a smartass. I’d been thinking about the Union’s growing futility for some time. It was mired at the time in a longstanding wrangle over the need to represent and be represented by minority writers that couldn’t be resolved without abrogating the most fundamental tenets of egalitarian democracy, and it was leaning, it seemed to me, the wrong way on nearly every issue it faced in its attempts to be more inclusive and comforting to the sensitivities of writers who were feeling victimized. I was also wondering why what had been, just a few years before, a prestigious and effective organization that got things done and partied hard, was increasingly being ignored by governments and internally, and internally seemed more interested in dental plans for its members than in human rights, the conditions of culture in a rapidly marketizing world or good writing and excellence in publishing.

It struck me, during that AGM, that the participants were, well, getting long in the tooth. To test this, I made a windscreen survey of the people there, and discovered that there was just one female there in child-bearing condition—and no males with detectable—or relevant—sperm counts. The Writer’s Union of Canada had, to be blunt, gotten old. Its staleness, therefore, wasn’t just accidental: it was turning into the Canadian Authors Association. The CAA, started in 1924, was Canada’s initial organization for writers. But over the years, it had devolved into a group of ascot-wearing pensioners most interested in afternoon gin-and-tonics and giving overly-encouraging advice to career amateurs.

When I thought it all through, these devolutions seemed both logical and natural: most organizations emerge as a response to specific conditions and remain relevant and vital only as long as their issues remain current. The Canadian Authors Association emerged in an era when Canadians who wrote books were the cultural equivalent of unicorns. Canadians who wrote books were either oddball professors or scions of wealthy families who’d decided that a Canadian might just be capable of writing a real book. So they wrote and published some books, usually to overwhelming indifference from Canadian readers. But they persisted, and eventually succeeded in bringing Canadian authors a small degree of prestige, and Canadian books to the edge of cultural consciousness.

The Writers Union of Canada emerged from the consciousness of the 1960s, when a few far-sighted Canadian politicians began to recognize that if Canada was going to remain a sovereign and viable country, we’d have to defend ourselves culturally against the avalanche of American media, and politically against both Soviet and American imperialisms. Thus they set out to create, without much cost or fanfare, the conditions for a confident national identity. They set up subsidies, at first tentatively, to nurture a whole range of indigenous artistic activities, including a publishing industry that would be able to publish more than the Farley Mowats and Hugh McLennans, and do it in the locales in which the new writers lived and worked.

The Writers Union, according to legend, emerged from an Ontario Royal Commission on culture in 1971 that didn’t see any need to talk to any of Canada’s writers.  A few insulted writers—including longtime Dooney’s Café patron Ian Adams, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood and June Callwood, met in a Yorkville bar after Farley Mowat organized them to appear before the Commission, and their barroom grumblings set the stage for what was to become the Writers’ Union of Canada.  The Union was founded formally in Ottawa in November 1973, with Marian Engel as the chair.  The organization’s mandate, whether we now like to admit it or not, was to co-operate with and lobby the (mostly Federal) programs aimed at building a viable national culture. This was no small matter. In the years that followed, the arts were a major contributor in building a politically strong identity for Canada. Canadians gained a self-conscious sense of the country’s worth, a vibrant if sometimes amateurish scene blossomed across the arts, and some very good books were published in Canada by Canadian writers and their Canadian publishers. Until about 1990, both the Union and the federal cultural subsidy programs were, in other words, wildly successful.

The precise point at which the game began to change and the Union’s decline set in was, I think, the 1988 federal election. The lynchpin was the Canada/U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The Union and its members campaigned vigorously if ultimately unsuccessfully against the Agreement, focusing partly on preventing the Agreement from going forward, but also, and with some success, on getting cultural exemptions enshrined in the proposed Agreement should it go ahead.

Conservative Brian Mulroney won the election when NDP leader Ed Broadbent opportunistically decided it was more important to attack the sincere but slue-footed Liberal leader John Turner—who had traveled around the country listening to enough cultural lobbies that he understood what was truly at issue in the election—than to prevent Mulroney from imposing IMF trade rules and market values on Canada. NAFTA followed, coming into force in 1994, and cultural organizations have been fighting rear guard actions ever since, defending a decaying status quo that wasn’t good enough in the first place.

The Union was a less effective lobby in the NAFTA runup, and seemed not to notice at all when, around the same time, market-modeled Chapters and then Indigo began the WalMarting of Canada’s independent bookstores into oblivion. The Union’s membership had always been overwhelmingly white and middle-class and now came under attack by its few visible-minority members for being insufficiently multicultural. The Union had no answer to the attacks except to squirm uncomfortably and to start membership drives that would attract minority writers. Unfortunately, its membership rolls seemed to swell mainly with childless but sensibly-dressed children’s authors, and I found myself helplessly referring to the Union as the “Writhers’ Union”—and losing interest.

This is not to suggest that the Union has been useless since 1994. It has done excellent work on aspects of copyright and contract law, and on other issues that I confess didn’t capture my imagination. But its organizational psychology has remained constant: it is an organization designed to cooperate with governments on intellectual and artistic expansion in an era where very few governments see any of the things writers do as more than a small and slightly irritating industrial activity connected with entertainment and tourism that would be better left to sink or swim in the currents of the global economy.

Eventually, I found myself muttering about banning polyester leisure suits, instituting mandatory drunkenness at the AGM banquets, and finally, I made the suggestion that the Union might want to disband itself. I ended up disbanding my own active membership instead.

I attended several events at this year’s Writers’ Union AGM, mainly because I was hosting some friends who’d flown out from Northern B.C. to attend.  One of the events I attended was a panel on “The New Realities in Publishing” which featured, longtime editor Anne Collins, Owen Sound bookseller Charlotte Stein, and Michael Tamblyn formerly of BookNet, now Executive Vice President of Content, Sales & Merchandising for Kobo, which is the proprietary electronic reader fronted by Chapters/Indigo.

Collins was charming and articulate about the difficulties book publishers are currently facing without being particularly forthcoming; the likeable Stein, who operates in a town with an area population of about 35-40,000 and has to face competition from Indigo, was extremely candid about the conditions of bookselling (dire), almost pleading for writers to support independents, and she was pointedly clear about how many booksellers we’re losing and what it means. Neither directly mentioned what Gordon Lockheed has called the 800 pound gorilla who sits in on every discussion of literary culture in Canada, and no one in the audience seemed to be aware of its presence. Then Tamblyn got up and slung a plethora of optimistic generalities about the inevitability of electronic readers. Not a single writer present asked a question about how writers incomes will be affected by 10 percent royalties on $3.99 electronic downloads of their books, why the royalty schedule has remained intact even though the overhead ratios have been radically altered, or why the download portals deserve 30-50 percent of the take when all a portal requires to serve the entire continent is a one-room bank of servers somewhere in the U.S. and a PayPal apparatus.

In a brief conversation with a younger writer after the panel, I was asked which aboriginal tribe I was a member of—I suspect because I was wearing a medallion based on a Joe David buquis mask I’ve owned for 35 years, and because my white hair makes me look a little like Chief Dan George. I made a mental note to get a haircut, pointed out my blue eyes to the younger writer, explained that the medallion was designed to ward off childrens’ authors, and got the hell out of there before something worse happened.

But the next night I attended, out of respect, the Margaret Laurence lecture, given this year by founding member Graeme Gibson, a man I respect and like. The lecture went 40 minutes over its scheduled time, and Gibson, as always, managed to be modest and avuncular at the same time about the way we were, but had seemingly little perspective or useful advice for the future. There was supposed to be an hour of drinks and conversation after the lecture, but most of the attendees, already past their bedtimes, scuttled away immediately, and half an hour later only a few dozen diehards were left in the room. Not one of them, as far as I could see, was getting drunk or wanting to party.

So, what to do about the Writers’ Union?

It has become an elderly organization dominated by elderly writers (a perceptive ex-chair complained to me over dinner a few nights after the AGM ended that even though the Union has twice the number of members it had fifteen years ago, the same familiar faces and numbers show for the AGMs) and it has major structural and demographic problems. The Union’s constitution is part of its problem: those who serve on the national executive (particularly those who serve as chair) are given de facto emeritus status, and are, for all intents and purposes, grandfathered and put out to pasture, thus depriving the organization of both its intellectual credibility and prestige and a powerful portion of its natural leadership. The organization, meanwhile, remains loyal to its social democratic (or Trudeau Liberal) origins: almost by instinct it continues to seek liason with government, and distrusts publishers, who it treats as the exploiting class even though a more real danger to its individual members and their incomes lies with the 800 pound gorilla, Amazon.com and other high-discount wholesalers.

There’s a schizophrenia to this: Brian Mulroney’s ghost has writers hoping for the Big Global Score, and they hope against hope for it as they watch individual income and publishing opportunities open to writers dwindle as the collective pie shrinks and the market doors close. They’ve ingested the Koolaid of the Entrepreneurs, in other words.

When I suggested, a decade ago, that the Union disband itself, I’d argued that a new organization for writers would appear within six months, spearheaded by younger writers who could cherry-pick the best of their elders for advice they’d be free to ignore without disrespect. I imagined—or maybe just hoped—that such an organization would be more focused on the conditions of writing as a political and cultural-building activity and less interested, as the young can afford to be, on the welfare of the individual writers. (The Writers’ Trust, meanwhile, with its Woodcock Fund, would be there to bail out those who crash and burn).  I also suggested that writers needed to make an alliance with publishers, who the Union has always treated with distrust, and stop hoping that governments are going to be our friends.

Today, I see things only slightly differently. A decade ago I was just half serious about the Union disbanding itself. Now I’m 75 percent serious. But I’m officially elderly myself these days, so I’m obliged to be wiser and more polite. So here’s my carefully-phrased opinion about what the Writers’ Union of Canada should do with itself:

1.)    The Union needs to conduct an open debate on its constitution, to see where and if its goals are still relevant. The wisdom of pasturing out its leadership ought to be part of that discussion, as should be the tightening (or loosening) of membership requirements.

2.)    In the face of the electronic publishing onslaught, the Union needs to make an alliance with Canada’s book publishers and their associations with a redistribution of royalty incomes and discount structures at the top of the agenda. Gordon Lockheed, here, has suggested a Canadian download portal under the umbrella of the National Library, a schedule of download pricing that isn’t going to bankrupt publishers and/or end the editing of books as we know it, along with a program to format Canadian backlists for electronic sale.  I concur on most of these ideas, even if they’re fairly distant from practical reality as currently understood.

3.)    A wide-ranging and open discussion of the likely future of cultural subsidies needs to be undertaken, and a renewal of arguments for them is a crucial element of that discussion.

4.)    Finally, I think we’ve reached a state of things where the Writers’ Union of Canada needs to become a political organization again, one that vigorously raises and articulates the relationship between free speech, open cultural activity, the education of the public, and the necessary conditions for democracy—before all of these things disappear beneath the stifling blanket of the marketplace and its neoDarwinian fantasies.

2347 words,  June 6^th, 2011

As well as the Booker, the Trust administers a wide variety of other book prizes that includes  BBC Short Story, Early Years Awards (for books for pre-school children), Teenage Prize, John Llewellyn (writer under 35), Orange Prize (women), Power of Reading, Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Sunday Times Short Story Prize, Kim Scott Walwyn (for women in publishing), Nestle Children’s Book Prize, New Writing Ventures. Again, I note that not once is the Trust’s name attached to any of these prizes. The National Book Trust also runs numerous reading campaigns, including Children’s Book Week, Children’s Laureate position, Diversity in Publishing and Get London Reading. The organization also develops and produces an astonishing array of resources for British schools.

Here in Canada, the closest equivalent to The National Book Trust is The Writers’ Trust of Canada. It also administers a stable of prizes, including lifetime achievement, non-fiction, fiction, children’s writing and several others. In the Writers’ Trust’s literature it says the organization was founded to “encourage a flourishing writing community in this country.” While that is accurate enough, the impetus to start the organization was to publish and disseminate a series of teachers’ guides about Canadian literature that had been produced in the early 1970s by a combination of teachers and writers for The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC). Once the project was complete, TWUC felt it would be in a conflict situation to promote and distribute the guides so The Writers’ Development Trust was created to take over that job. Teachers who used the guides still remember them as an extremely useful teaching resource. Unfortunately, the guides were not updated, nor has anything replaced that service to educators in the years since.

Over the years The Writers’ Trust (“Development” was dropped along the way) has administered other projects involved in education. For a time, Writers in Electronic Residence found its home with the Trust. There was also at one time a fund to supply funding for writers in schools. Canada Book Day, which developed into Canada Book Week, was also administered by the Trust until it was cancelled by the Trust, (not by its funders) in 2003. [Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Jean has pointed out that for a time she was the Director of that program.]

In addition to the prizes, the Trust administers the Woodcock Fund, which was created by George Woodcock during his lifetime to provide grants to writers “facing unforeseen financial need.” After Woodcock’s death and that of his wife Inge, a large portion of their estate was left to this fund. As of May 2011, Don Oravec reports that the Woodcock Fund has provided financial support to 171 writers to the tune of  $824,773.  Oravec anticipates that the fund’s output will reach the million-dollar mark in another 1 ½ years. The fund’s capital base is solid, and has held up well even after the 2008 financial meltdown, continuing to earn about 4.5% annually, with no risk.

For many years the Trust has also supported emerging writers through the Humber scholarship and it has also funded the Margaret Laurence lectures, given annually at the Writer’s Union AGM. The Margaret Laurence lecture is designed to provide a small honorarium to a senior writer and the lecture is meant to inspire younger writers.

Like most non-profit organizations that support the arts, The Writers’ Trust has had its share of ups and downs. These days executive director Don Oravec is trying hard to stabilize sponsorship for its prizes (you can imagine the challenge of fundraising in the recent economic environment) and to develop new projects and programs. Since his tenure began, the Trust has taken over ownership and running of the Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and has launched a cross-country workshop program organized in conjunction with local libraries. Currently, the Trust has no programs or projects involving education or promoting the use of Canadian literature in schools.

During my time at the Trust, the Canada Council (CC) approached the organization about its role in education. There was considerable concern at the CC that the amount of Canadian literature being taught in secondary schools was in decline. Might it, asked the CC, be time to dust off those teachers’ guides and rewrite them? Since I had published a national art and literature magazine for high school students and worked with schools across the country on that project as well as Canada Book Week, I was called into the conversation. It was argued that too much had changed in both education and publishing to start producing secondary materials when we didn’t know what primary materials were being used, or why, so I developed and proposed an extensive research project to answer those questions. The executive summary can be found here.

My final report included a series of recommendations about what could be done to improve the situation, which turned out to be even worse than the CC or I had imagined. The Writers’ Trust board at the time was very excited about the report and its potential, but nothing further has since been done to implement it, although subsequent reports, notably one looking at school library collections, confirmed the veracity of the research. After George Bowering and I moved to BC it continued to bother me that no action had been taken. One problem is that since education is a provincial jurisdiction it is difficult to initiate effective changes at a national level. Thus I developed a project for British Columbia called BC Bookworks, and under the umbrella of ArtStarts we applied for and received funding from CC and Heritage. The aim was to initiate ways to get more Canadian Literature into BC high schools. We had meetings with all the stakeholders, educators and librarians. In the middle of the project the English Language Arts Curriculum for grades 8 to 12 came up for review, the first time in many years. Because we already had the communication networks in place, we decided to respond to the curriculum review, and  request that Canadian Literature be mandated.

We considered pushing for a distinct Canadian Literature course but were concerned that it would be made an elective, as the grade 11 course is in Ontario. There, without sufficient enrollment, the course is often cancelled. Here’s an excerpt from my final report:

Mandated curriculum

English 12 First Peoples

Research suggests that in the environment of a Canadian literature course students learn context and cultural literacy. Considering the support for a distinct Canadian literature course (as indicated from the teachers’ survey) we carefully reviewed a new ELA course in B.C. that was in development and pilot during this project; English 12 First Peoples (ENG 12 FP) provides a template for the development of a Canadian literature course, or a series of classroom assessment models for various grades.

An education steering committee (educators, administration, Ministry, elders, writers, approximately 40 members) worked with six ELA teachers to create a vision for the course. The teachers worked as a unit to develop classroom assessment models (CAMs) and exams based on the new ELA curriculum, then wrote teachers’ guides and exams.

At the time of the writing of this report the pilot for this course has been completed but the final curriculum and CAMs are not available until September 2008. Jean Baird was able to review the ENG12 FP CAMs but the document is not available for distribution.

Response to curriculum draft

The ELA 8 to 12 curriculum in B.C. had not been reviewed or revised since 1995. A draft revision was scheduled to be posted in the spring 2007, was delayed several times and eventually was posted for feedback in the fall 2007. A thorough review of the draft revealed no mandate for Canadian literature. In the Achievement Indicators there were examples of Canadian literature but there was no clear prescribed mandate.

We consulted with our now established education network and developed a response. The draft curriculum provided a timely opportunity to address the number one priority for educators and stakeholders. Those who had worked on the curriculum, administrators and executive of BC Teachers of English Language Arts (BCTELA) all concurred that mandating the inclusion of Canadian literature at all grade levels would have greater long-term impact and by necessity, involve every ELA secondary teacher; we decided on this approach rather than a distinct course that would have been difficult to place in an already very full course selection.[i]

We drafted and revised dozens of letters until all the educators being consulted agreed on approach and wording. We then reviewed our databases, specifically the stakeholders’ network, and drafted a request for support. That request was also vetted through the stakeholders. Finally we circulated the request. We hoped for a list of responses of between 50 and 100 individuals and organizations to indicate a broad base of interest and support. It also seemed the best course for ArtStarts to collect those names and compile one response to make it easier for people to support the initiative.

Response far exceeded our target. The final list of individuals and organizations ran more than 50 pages and represented hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals. We were not prepared for the level of passion about the issue. We only asked for people to indicate they supported the initiative and to give name, contact information and position (i.e. Jane Doe, Vancouver, teacher). Many people took the further step of writing detailed and passionate letters.

At the end of December packages were sent to the Minister of Education Shirley Bond, Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell and the person in the Ministry responsible for ELA curriculum, Gail Hughes-Adams.

We worked closely with executives of BCTELA, and in the end, the formal response from BCTELA also included support for mandated Canadian literature on the new curriculum. We know that the English department at UBC made a formal response as did various Boards of Education across the province and many individuals. In February at the BCTELA professional development day, Gail Hughes-Adams told the educators in attendance that she received about 200 responses to the draft curriculum. The number one concern was to mandate Canadian literature into the final curriculum document. Insiders at the Ministry believe the response is directly attributable to the ArtStarts initiative.

The final curriculum will not be completed until the end of May, so at the time of this report we do not know the language that might be used for the inclusion of Canadian literature. We have received a letter from Joel Palmer, Director Learning Initiatives Branch responding on behalf of Shirley Bond and Gordon Campbell, indicating the Ministry “will be changing some of the Prescribed Learning Outcomes for ELA 8-12 to include specific reference to Canadian literature.” The PLOs are essential to real impact and change since that is the part of the document that becomes law in B.C.

Rallying the troops on the response to curriculum allowed the project to:

• Illustrate the effectiveness of the new networks;
• Expand those networks (a database of curriculum supporters creates a broader network that now includes more educators but also parents, grandparents, prior students, etc);
• Create a model of advocacy that can be duplicated in other provinces;
• Increase awareness around the issue of Canadian literature in schools;
• Illustrate the broad level of concern for this issue.

Here is what we reported and requested to the Ministry in the letter mentioned above:

…Both the teachers and the stakeholders noted that a key to achieving a higher presence for Canadian literature in the classroom is clear direction from the provincial curriculum. Currently only Saskatchewan has a mandated Canadian literature course, a unit in the grade 12 course. According to the research, elsewhere in the country it is possible, and more likely probable, that a student can graduate having never studied a Canadian novel during high school. The exception to this trend is private schools where Canadian literature is taught on a regular basis.

Please accept this letter and the material in the accompanying package as a formal response to the BC Ministry of Education’s draft of the new English Language Arts Curriculum for grades 8 to 12. We are suggesting that in each year from grade 8 to 12 each student should “read, both collaboratively and independently, to comprehend a variety of literary texts, including one or more significant works of Canadian literature.” The proposed amendment allows for the study of a play, several short stories, a collection of poetry or poetry by three or four different poets, one or two novels, or work by Canadian literary critics.

You will note that the IRP developers have already included many Canadian literature examples in their Achievement Indicators, so this addition merely affirms the study of a selection of Canadian literature texts as a requirement at each grade level. Since Achievement Indicators are suggestions only, we believe the curriculum needs the force of prescription.

Included with this letter is a list of organizations and individuals—writers, publishers, parents, educators and educational administrators at all levels, provincial and national writing, publishing and literary organizations—that are in support of this proposed change to the curriculum. We are also including a selection from the many detailed and passionate letters received. A copy of this package has also been sent to Premier Campbell and the Honorable Shirley Bond.

The development of the English 12 First Peoples course indicates that the province of BC recognizes the importance of cultural literacy in the classroom. The organizations and individuals listed believe that cultural literacy must include Canadian books and Canadian literature for all students.

The proposed amendment to the curriculum would position BC as an education leader. Canadian literature in BC classrooms would also support the ambition to make BC the most literature jurisdiction in North American, for surely we cannot make such a claim when we are not teaching our own literature in all our classrooms.

When the final curriculum was released, our suggestions were implemented. Supporters cheered, said “Good for you, Jean. What a wonderful precedent this sets for the rest of the country.” I said, Baloney. Nothing will happen without passionate and organized advocacy across the country.

So I’ve continued to push. Here, another excerpt from my final report:

Canadian Literature Education Coordinator

BookWorks BC has made great strides in making Canadian literature a stronger presence in the classrooms of B.C. secondary schools. It has worked to unify communities—publishing/education—and create a unified approach. In order for the momentum to continue there needs to be a focused coordinated approach. It is recommended that the position of Canadian Literature Educator Coordinator be created. Jean Baird has had discussions with Don Oravec at The Writers’ Trust and Susan Swann at The Writers’ Union about a joint initiative of these two organizations to create this position.

A Canadian Literature Education Coordinator could also work to create other partnerships. Poetry Out Loud is a joint initiative of The Poetry Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, www.poetryoutloud.org This program democratizes poetry excellence in a classy, enduring way, accessible to young people regardless of background. It contributes to cultural heritage, to oral heritage and showcases the variety and wealth of aesthetics and activities in poetry. In order to participate, teachers and young people need to read poems and think carefully about them. It could work beautifully in Canada and would have a much richer impact than a spelling bee (referred to by many educators as The Geekfest). An Education Coordinator could work with the Union, the Trust and the League of Canadian Poets to see whether Poetry Out Loud could be expanded into Canada.

Susan Swan in Toronto was very excited about the possibility but couldn’t get any action at The Writers’ Union. The board at The Writers’ Trust wasn’t convinced that the organization should be involved in education—even though its roots are in education and it has been involved in various education programs over the years. It has, in reality, strayed from those roots and the current board has no interest in going back. The Canada Council and the federal Dept of Heritage had expressed interest in funding such a position. Again, to my knowledge, no action has been taken.

I do know that a group of publishers in Ontario did get as far as meeting with the deputy Minister of Education in Ontario. He got it. Immediately. He understood, as does the Department of Canadian Heritage, the huge impact it would have for the Canadian publishing industry (most of which is in Ontario) if Canadian educational dollars could be repatriated. But after the suggestion floated around the response came back—it would be perceived as “protectionism” to mandate Canadian Literature in ON schools. Huh? Is teaching Canadian history or geography protectionist?

I wrote to Ian Wilson, then head of Library and Archives Canada about the following section from my final report:

Better resources/working with other organizations:

Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Literature Educators’ Database

Educators believe that a user-friendly and constantly updated online directory of Canadian books, writers, and related curriculum materials is the most important resource that could be developed.[ii] Teachers would like easy one-stop access to resources, ideally a database of Canadian Literature titles recommended/reviewed by teachers that is sortable by grade level, and themes. Such a database could also indicate whether other support material is available, such as films, interviews with the author, lesson plans. In short, a website designed specifically with teachers for the needs of Canadian ELA teachers.

It is important that such an initiative be housed with an organization that has the administrative structure and expertise to take on a project of such large scale. The host organization must also have an understanding of the education system as well as a thorough knowledge of the complexities of the publishing industry—concerns of writers and publishers. The ideal organization would have an established record of success working with schools. And, it would need easy access to Canadian books.

Library and Archives Canada fits all these requirements. Library and Archives Canada has an established reputation with educational/cultural projects. The holdings of the Library, the depth of the Archives and the expertise of its staff and librarians make the institution uniquely positioned to host such a project.

A letter of inquiry was sent to Ian Wilson at LAC. Mr. Wilson responded with interest, asking for a brief, detailed proposal which was completed and sent March 2008.

Teachers and students from coast to coast would use a Canadian Literature Educators’ Database. Educators around the globe would quickly use it. Such a website would:

• Create links among writers, artists, publishers and students, educators;
• Work to create better links between literary/language arts and fine arts, social studies, and history studies;
• Increase writer visibility and title viability in schools;
• Supplement school resources;
• Respond to curriculum needs;
• Provide a reviewing tool about Canadian literature that is distinct to schools.

A Canadian Literature Educators’ Database would benefit schools, libraries, readers, and researchers both nationally and internationally. The database would make LAC’s vast archives accessible to Canadian schools in a format that is pertinent and user-friendly.

I received no response to the requested detailed proposal and to my knowledge nothing has happened.

Can you see why I’m a little frustrated?

By odd coincidence, on the very day I was working on this piece, George Bowering forwarded the following request he’d received:

Hello, Mr. Bowering. The Globe and Mail is doing a spread this Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and I have been asked to solicit quick comments from prominent writers about what the book meant or means to them. Do you have any thoughts? I am looking for no more than 100 words, an email or a quick phone call.

Thx  for your attention.

George replied as follows If To Kill a Mockingbird were a suggestion rather than a book title, I would be all for it. For a long time this book has been a staple on the reading lists for Canadian high schools. I am thoroughly tired of it. When teachers are asked why it is there, they say because the stockroom is full of copies from last year, and because it is pretty cheap, compared to Canadian books. Then when asked, they can’t think of any Canadian books. Do we wonder why?

I wrote to the Globe reporter, explaining about BC Bookworks. I told him that during the project a teacher had suggested we call the campaign “Kill the Mockingbird” and pointed out that Harper Lee must have made several fortunes from royalties from Canadian education dollars. He thought that was funny, then confessed he’d never read the novel. How, I asked him, did you avoid that? Turns out he attended a private school. At private schools they do teach Canadian literature—administration and parents expect it–and there is adequate library funding for book acquisitions.

This is a problem that has been researched for years, yet no organization will take responsibility or action. BC Bookworks indicates that the public does care, and that it want to see changes—which both surprised and pleased me. As for decision makers, anecdotal experience or parental prejudice should not trump extensive and thorough research.

There is a glimmer of hope with the National Reading Campaign. Its first summit happened in the fall 2010 with two more scheduled. So, more talk and more research. Let’s hope this time some action also occurs.

[ii] In the survey, educators identified a number of sites that they use on a regular basis for ELA classes. All are American. Sometimes Margaret Atwood will be included, or occasionally other Canadian writers, and often British writers, but these sites are predominantly about American writers. The Vancouver School Board subscribes (for $4000 a year) to one of these sites: www.teachingbooks.com. There are no equivalent Canadian sites.

[1] In B.C. at the grade 12 level there is ENG 12 (a graduation requirement), ENG 12 FP (the new course, currently an elective for schools to offer and possibly an alternative graduation requirement), LIT 12 (a survey course, Chaucer through to the C20th). In B.C. creative writing can be offered at any grade 8 to 12, so to have a specific Canadian Literature course would mean it would be competing with at least two other courses at each grade level. Plus, it would always be an elective both for schools to offer, and if offered, for students to take.

[1] In the survey, educators identified a number of sites that they use on a regular basis for ELA classes. All are American. Sometimes Margaret Atwood will be included, or occasionally other Canadian writers, and often British writers, but these sites are predominantly about American writers. The Vancouver School Board subscribes (for $4000 a year) to one of these sites: www.teachingbooks.com. There are no equivalent Canadian sites.

3632 w. May 18, 2011

The common symptoms are decreased sales of books, and the threat of a radical shift to the Internet and electronic reading devices. Evidence suggests that book publishing is experiencing a more rapid-than-predicted technology shift to electronic reading devices (along with the relative improvement of both electronic and paper piracy techniques, generally coming from China). Matching this is an apparent sea change in public reading habits and preferences that has an uncertain trajectory, and has book-sellers and writers as well as book publishers in a state of panic.

Less frequently mentioned as a malady is the domination of the book market by chain bookstores that demand profit-killing discounts and exercise overly swift turnover of titles, often while imposing fees for giving books face-out exposure. Largely because of the chains, book publishers have experienced increased problems in predicting which fiction titles will succeed, along with a general narrowing of “acceptable” subject matter; a non-fiction focus on “celebrity expertise” that shortens shelf life (because celebrity is inherently short-lived); a merchandising-induced pressure toward rigidified genres;  and marketing departments that arrogate editorial choices. These risk-averse mercantile behaviors each, in different ways, promote editorial risk aversion, which in turn suppresses creative courage amongst writers, along with the public and expert cultural discourse which is the lifeblood of book culture. Sounds like a crisis to me.

While all of these global difficulties pertain to Canadian bookselling and publishing, Canada’s book publishers face special conditions.  The most important of these conditions is the existence of Chapters/Indigo, which has managed to secure an unprecedented share of the book market. The effect of Chapters/Indigo’s extreme and sometimes capricious trade practices (discussed in a recent dooneyscafe.com article here) has inflicted an intensified version of the current global malaise on Canadian writers and publishers.

Canadian publishing, particularly its cohort of small and regionally-oriented publishers, survives only with subsidies and trade protections that level the field with American and British publishers, which enjoy larger markets and the major economy-of-scale advantages that go with size. Today, Canadian publishers are experiencing, along with subsidy erosion, a weakening of governmental will that has undermined vital copyright and market protections while offering little help in dealing with technology change. The small, regionally-based publishers are now more or less shut out of conventional sales avenues by Chapters/Indigo trade practices and by the destruction and/or demoralization of independent bookstores across the country. One can foresee the disappearance of a sizeable percentage of regional publishers in the next five years: they simply have no way of selling their books in sufficient quantity to survive.  Several larger publishers, meanwhile,  have closed (or are threatening to) their doors or contracting operations, sometimes as victims of Chapters/Indigo’s trade practices, and sometimes as a result of their offshore or American corporate owners simply choosing to close branch plant editorial and distribution operations as a cost-consolidation measure within what they see as a shrinking market.

1.) Technology Change:

The greatest single difficulty book publishers face in the arena of technology change lies in how to respond to electronic reading devices. The reality is that this is a technology that already works and will see substantial improvement in the next several years, and is likely to eventually subsume anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of book sales as the reading devices improve and become ubiquitous.  It seems logical to suppose that the changeover will be particularly rapid amongst younger readers, and that within a decade, educational reading, at all levels, will be shifted (by youth preference and by the institutional economies of scale possible) to electronic reading devices. The savings possible in the public education sector alone dictates a certain inevitability, even in primary and middle schools, given chronic budget shortages within the school system and the growing political acceptance of the philosophy of user-pay: Parents will be forced to buy electronic readers for their children, and to download school textbooks instead of having them provided free.

The difficulties that this will present to publishers over the next decade are substantial. Key issues include the possibility of market consolidations by the existing major retailers in capturing download portals for electronic readers; the erosion of conventional editorial and distribution economies of scale; the possible emergence of both pirate and “Indie” distribution networks;  and a price structure on electronic books that is economically untenable to both publishers and writers.

How the advance of electronic readers will proceed isn’t assured, nor is where its uses are going to be most attractive to consumers, whether private or institutional.  Mass-market fiction, pulp fiction, How-To, Self Help and reference materials would appear to be logical candidates for quick transition, although it is probably worth remembering that a sizable percentage of self-help book buyers don’t actually read, and get whatever help they want from the conspicuous placement of their self-help volumes on the coffee table. But there are significant data on the other side: the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, is no longer published in a paper edition, and there are contradictory theories about the adaptability of very young readers.

It doesn’t all have to be bad news for book publishers, however, provided that they’re willing to act decisively. Much of the electronic market has yet to be settled, and opportunities exist if book publishers adapt swiftly and accurately. Differing formats and download platforms haven’t yet been firmly settled as the electronic reading devices proliferate and improve, and ground-floor opportunities remain open. What is clear is that sellers completely dominate the download platforms and electronic formatting, it will be catastrophic to book publishers and writers, particularly if equitable pricing structures don’t emerge. Given the myopia of contemporary business practices, there’s no reason to believe that such a structure is likely to be created.

2.) Cultural Change:

The cultural changes that are occurring in the book trade involve reading habits and preferences, and are largely, but not entirely, driven by technology “advances” that may or may not be reader-friendly. For instance, it isn’t conclusively established that people are reading less than they were 20 years ago. What clearly is changing is what they read, and how, where and why they read, and how reading preferences break down demographically. Common sense suggests that younger people more readily read more on video terminals than their elders, and that generally, reading habits are becoming more myopic and topical. But the seeming corollary conclusion—that paper is the preferred reading medium of an aging and shrinking demographic, and that their cultural reading habits are doomed—likely isn’t as certain as the Internet futurists predict. The reality is almost certainly far more complex, but since the generalities seem to pertain, nobody really knows what to do about it, and anxiety therefore reigns. The rapid and enormous industry built around electronic gaming—already larger in dollar value than the book publishing industry—is a cultural and economic wild-card that no one really understands either as a cultural or economic phenomenon, and its relationship to reading and education has yet to be examined except by dismissive partisans on both sides.

Another barely-examined cultural change has been the withering away, over the last decade, of book reviewing—as most dramatically reflected in the disappearance across North America of stand-alone book review sections in major newspapers and the complete disappearance in Canada’s newspapers of full-time staff book reviewers. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Newspaper review sections have shrunk, and the reviews that are published are usually truncated. Key long-form review magazines like Books In Canada and Saturday Night have folded, and while some of what they once did has been replaced by online sources, most are unedited, and more than a few are little more than blogs. Trying to replace the longstanding discursive ecology with merchandising and the sort of half-baked fan reviews that appear on Amazon.com simply hasn’t worked, and won’t. The breakdown of reviewing has damaged the book publishing industry far more than is generally recognized: it has pushed books to the margins of cultural discourse, and this is a problem that book publicists simply do not have a practical answer to.

3.) Mercantile Change:

Also poorly understood are the intangible changes that the risk-averse merchandising habits of the bookselling chains have wreaked on both book publishers and book writers, and how much more damaging they are in Canada because the virtual monopoly permits Chapters/Indigo book buyers to effectively dictate what books will be published. It can be argued that the situation has led to a de facto “prize culture” which I examined recently here.

The reality is that with the current trade and merchandising practices in place, both prize-focused and culturally “responsible” publishing are  suicidal in the long term. Prize culture is a pyramid scheme, and thus not viable for long, and if present trends intensify, there will be no way to sell books that “merely” have cultural value. This is not an invitation to roll over and let the market decide. Trying to predict what the market wants instead of figuring out what ought to happen with a realistic view of what the circumstances permit will merely delay the suicide point. Book publishing has been a culturally central activity in modern civilization, but it may well be in the process of being transformed into a very minor market segment within the entertainment industry. Any book publisher unconcerned about such a transformation probably ought to get out of the business now, because he or she is going to lack the energy and élan to effectively resist what is occurring, the pressures for which will accelerate in the next decade.

Can Anything Be Done?

Sure.  But nothing is going to work until publishers, writers and booksellers admit that technology and cultural changes have already occurred, and that “business as usual” is not an option.  All three groups need to make an active commitment to figuring out the new parameters they’re going to be working with, and not merely the purely commercial ones. The impetus, if they need one, is that this is a situation in which publishers, writers and booksellers all stand to lose their livelihoods if they don’t get it right. As it stands, neither the recognition that a mutual crisis exists, nor the will to cooperate has emerged.

In the February 10, 2011 New York Review of Books, longtime Random House editor Jason Epstein provided a useful history of how the present predicament evolved in the U.S.  Most of what he says is applicable to Canada.  Epstein outlined the dysfunctionality of American publishing, comparing the current practices of book publishing (generously) with the ritual potlatching of the aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast, which he identifies, correctly, as a highly organized form of economic and cultural hysteria. A more apt but less generous comparison could have been made to the cargo cults of Micronesia.

“Despite this irrationality,” Epstein optimistically concludes, “writers continue to submit and editors continue to publish season after season the normal quota of distinguished books, which readers buy and read as they always have. That this ancient activity survives under difficult conditions testifies to the persistence of storytelling as an indispensable human activity, one that has outlived far worse hazards—the burning of the library at Alexandria, the bonfires of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others…

“Today’s publishing industry,” he continues, “including its major retailers, did not incur these distortions by rational choice but by adapting under pressure to external conditions, while the industry’s mainly passive response to the rise of digital technology over the past quarter-century has blocked innovation. Should the retail market deteriorate further, publishers may at last be forced to heed the digital imperative, consolidate their lists, and sell directly to consumers. Some publishers may experiment by setting up their own freestanding digital start-ups but my guess is that a separate, self-financed, digital industry will coexist with and over time replace many functions of the traditional firms as the logic and the economies of digital technology increasingly assert themselves. For example, the rapidly growing self-publishing industry, relying on print-on-demand technology, has created infrastructure that groups of sophisticated editors might adapt to create their own lists for worldwide sale online while arranging with traditional distributors to market physical inventory to traditional retail accounts.”

That, alas, is the optimistic view.  Epstein takes the grand view: that the great river of human expression may change course, and that its flow may ebb and surge, but, well, it’s a great and permanent river. Jaron Lanier, in You Are Not a Gadget, suggests that fundamentalists of the digital economy don’t see it the same way. They see human expression as a granular ocean of data, and individual authority and believe that books are obsolete, about to be transformed into a collectivized noosphere, and with a “global book” replacing both writers and individual books.

I’ll come back to whether that’s a threat—and what the dimensions of the threat are—later. Here, let’s make two provisional assumptions: a.) that individual expression and understanding can’t be replaced without a vast penalty in specificity and, yes, understanding, and b.) that the cultural purpose of book publishing is to clarify individual expression and understanding (or, in plainer English, to edit books so writers make sense, and to then format the books, print them and disseminate them to the interested public). If we accept those two assumptions, then we must also accept that between the eclipse of  “cultural” development by purely market-grounded decision-making, shifts in reading technology and alterations in reading habits, book publishing is in trouble, and that the trouble isn’t minor: this is an economic crisis for book publishers and writers, and it is a cultural crisis for all of us.

Responding to this proactively will require courage. Publishers and writers need to accept the eventuality of a 50-50 or greater split of electronic to paper, remembering that the important question is when it will happen, not if it will. In late January 2011, According to PC World “Amazon announced that digital books were outselling their traditional print counterparts for the first time ever on its site, with an average of 115 Kindle editions being sold for every 100 paperback editions.” Whether or not this is a planted piece of semi-information doesn’t really matter. If it isn’t true now, it will be with the next year or two at Amazon, and eventually across the entire bookselling sector. Sony has sold out its PR650 e-reader 6 months before the next generation is due, and third party sources estimate the sale of Amazon’s Kindle are in the 4-5 million range, and that even though only 650,000 book titles are available for download within Amazon’s proprietary format, that number will grow rapidly. It would appear that Amazon is the current leading player, and that they will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. On balance, their dedicated e-reader is superior to the competition, and its major flaws (such as the inability to reference page numbers from the printed version, thus making it useless for research and reference purposes) are likely to be corrected in future updates unless Internet fundamentalists hold ascendancy. Most e-readers are being improved on a more-than-yearly basis.

Since electronic books don’t require a bookstore or warehouse, the critical points are the formatting of the books, and the sales portal and/or download platforms. One thing is abundantly clear: whoever controls the electronic portals will eventually end up controlling 50 percent of the book trade, and probably the most profitable portions, given the direct absence of overheads—no paper and no bookstores. Whoever controls the download portals will also end up dominating—and dictating to—the publishers and writers in much the same way that Chapters/Indigo now dominates and dictates to conventional book publishing in Canada.

At the moment, there are a half-dozen major download portals, each with varying numbers of titles available. About 20 download formats exist already, most of them proprietary, and all with flaws. In the best scenario the number of portals will grow and the number of formats will shrink, but neither eventuality is a sure thing.

Book publishers, in cooperation with writers and their organizations, should jointly investigate the feasibility of bypassing the retail electronic chains by setting up a Canadian Internet Book website that can sell all Canadian titles: Call it The Canadian Electronic Publisher, or whatever. Understanding the various existing formats to determine which is best is a vital part of this investigation, along with a clear understanding of what problems need to be solved by the format to make it dominant. Figuring out how to retain pagination and formatting from the original print publication would be a given because ensuring the cross-reference compatibility from electronic to paper format would be a serious advance on existing formats, as would text-capture software that would permit the capture of blocks of text for quotation that coincides with existing standards for scholarly and journalistic activities. (2 paragraphs, or 300 words). Current arguments that allow such a technology will invite piracy are nearsighted and silly.

Writers and publishers should also lobby government to help finance the cost of creating uniform electronic versions of both backlist, present and future titles for the entire range of Canadian publishers.  The impetus for this is that this could become a vital lifeline for the survival of regional publishers, and a way to avoid control of Canadian cultural publishing by offshore multimedia corporations. This may precipitate a skirmish with Chapters/Indigo and Amazon and thus should be done by a covering organization to avoid personal retaliations.

One possible way to make this venture both politically and economically palatable is to set up the backlist formatting and download platform as an adjunct to the National Library, which would split the proceeds with publishers and writers on an equitable formula to be determined.  If the program is vigourous enough it could constitute a major contribution to the funding of the national library, and provide a simila bonus to Canadian literary culture.  Given current government attitudes, this venture is unlikely to be successful, so private sector alternatives need to be investigated, and quickly.

The impermanence of electronic data, and rapidly changing database formats likewise need to be addressed. Books have existed in relatively stable formats for more than 500 years. No electronic format has yet to survive two decades, and the recording mediums employed are inherently unstable, unable to resist decay for even a single decade.

Not doing something innovative about these and other issues now will almost certainly be catastrophic in the long run and quite possibly in the near future. The most pressing issues—and opportunities–are purely economic: if a portion of the book trade is going electronic, the surest way to profits in that area is to find a way to cut out the non-essential middlemen. The joint publisher/writer committee should also prepared to petition government to seek other ways of leveling the economic playing field in the incoming technology shift toward electronic book publishing.

Below is a very short checklist of needed actions. It is not meant to be comprehensive:

1.)    Everyone involved in the production side of the book trade needs to get their heads around the new technologies to a degree of sophistication that won’t be comfortable or easy to achieve.

2.)    Writers and publishers—and their support organizations—need to learn to cooperate. Key points of necessary cooperation are:

a.) lobbying coherently for specific improvements to e-reader technologies that will protect the integrity of the original publication and make reference and scholarly use possible;

b.) developing technology/software solutions to reduce and/or prevent piracy. As it is, if a publisher gets a best-seller, it can now be cloned and reproduced within hours of publication, whether in print or electronic format;

c.) developing encoding formats toward a.) standardization, and b.) copyright protection;

d.) developing inexpensive methods of backlist formatting (there’s substantial profits to be made here, even if all that’s used is PDF formats);

e.)  developing economic scenarios for a 30-70, 50-50 and 70-30 kindle/paper split and understanding their consequences.  For instance, with a 50/50 split, editorial costs stay the same, formatting costs increase either slightly or a lot (depending on how many download formats have to be produced);  production and shipping charges drop substantially. Currently, no one has a clear notion of where the break-even points lie, how to prevent the new structure from sacrificing editorial quality, and what price structures are possible for electronic versions that guarantee adequate income to publishers and writers;

f.)  investigating the possibility of creating and publicizing an independent  web-based Canadian review journal that actually pays its reviewers properly, and instead of going the B.C. BookWorld local booster route, makes the website content open to controversy and contrary ideas. One way to fund it might be to tie it to the Canadian book download platform–again, at arms length.

Then there’s the issue of what digital fundamentalists call The Global Book, and its implications. Digital fundamentalists, first of all, do exist, and their numbers and their economic and cultural influence are no joke.  They have a plan for literate culture that is worth articulating, because it isn’t science fiction and it does have hugely transformative implications. Digitals have already radically altered both the economics and the culture of contemporary music in ways that have impoverished individual musicians and sharply limited their creativity—while enriching a single corporation: Apple, with it’s I-tunes.

The best source I’ve found on digital fundamentalism is Jaron Lanier.  Lanier is a virtual reality pioneer and musician who has held prestigious and often cutting-edge posts across the digital industry since the 1980s. At a glance, he might seem like an odd choice to be defending books and singular authorship, but he is perfectly positioned to elucidate the apocalyptic elements of the digital “revolution”. For the purposes of the subject I’m treating, his warnings about cloud computing, the emergence of a “global book” and his view of the internet controversy over “open culture” are as relevant as they are articulate.

Cloud computing, for those not yet familiar with the term, is both an already-accomplished fact and a self-serving myth.  The engineers of Internet2 have found ways to create dynamic databases that have extension and speed barely dreamed of in the 1990s. These “clouds” are quasi-virtual, created in part by multiple servers, and to a lesser extent by the linking of individual PCs. It’s why, when you’re accessing a public website, you’ll see it accessing multiple data sources: one for the data you want, another for advertising, a third to link them together in the website. Depending on your bias, it signals the enhanced security (notwithstanding the Sony Play Station database catastrophe) and efficiency of decentralized and enlarged databases, which mainly serve commercial purposes, or is a response to the growth of data complexity and the growing insecurity of smaller scale computers. Internet fundamentalists see it as moving things closer to what they call “The Singularity”: the apocalyptic takeover of reality as the cloud becomes alive and makes human beings and their individual intelligence at once immortal, infinitely connected to every other intelligence (provided that they’re online)—and obsolete.

Where all this arrives on the shoulders of writers and book publishers lies in the cloud’s connection to the “noosphere (the so-called hive mind of the Internet,  which is said to be greater than the sum of its parts. Lanier argues that it is simply a totality, similar to that of medieval Christianity or Maoist China, governed by ideology, likely to be less than the sum of its parts, and a leaden curb on human creativity.  “A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithyms recombine the fragments. I disagree. …quantity can overwhelm quality in human expression.” (p. 49, You Are Not A Gadget)

He’s even more precise about the implications of the noosphere on books:  “The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book…It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. …Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” (p. 46)

I invite you to read Lanier’s book and decide for yourself whether he’s overestimating the threat. What concerns me here are two civil institutions of Western Civilization that the noosphere and Global Book will profound affect, if they aren’t already doing so: The rules of evidence in science, scholarship and civil and criminal justice, and the Rule of Law.

A Global Book will not, by definition, operate by the rules of evidence, which demand logical argument supported by citation to any and all corroborative evidence and/or conclusive supposition and statement. If John Doe is a rapist, physical evidence and corroborating testimony must be profferred under strict rules: a mashup of uncited suppositional testimony will not suffice unless what we want to achieve is a lynching. Keeping evidential sight-lines and pathways regulated and accurate is the basis of not just intellectual life, but of both Western science and its judicial apparatuses. Without the rules of evidence to guide thought, we have ideological science and the insane political economies that convulsed the twentieth century: Nazi Fascism and Soviet-style Bolshevism. Without the Rule of Law we’re more likely to get the Spanish Inquisition with 500 channels and free Internet porn to opiate us than evolution toward deeper and freer being.

Let me bring this swiftly back to one of the practical implications we’re already seeing: Amazon.com’s reluctance to retain pagination and to impose reference software for its Kindle, and whether or not this is a software weakness soon to be rectified or an ideological stance deriving from its programmers’ belief in the desirability of noosphere and the Global book. I don’t know which it is, and I’ve been unable to get anyone at Amazon to clarify it. That Jaron Lanier calls Internet fundamentalists “Internet Maoists” tells you which way he thinks this is likely to go. At very least, it suggests that there are deeper currents to the crisis in book publishing than meet the eye, and that they are not going to be solved by refining business plans, improving sales and distribution apparatuses, and meeting the challenges of incoming technology with better widgets.

4600 words, May 12, 2011

But a third Woodcock in a single year—this time with Margaret Atwood presenting it to environmentalist David Suzuki at a February 3 Writers’ Trust fundraiser at the Hotel Vancouver—does require an explanation, and not just about why the award was given out three times in a single year. David Suzuki is a charming man and a persuasive advocate for the environment, but he is an environmentalist celebrity first, a television host second, a fruit-fly biologist somewhere in the past and barely a writer at all, since he has co-authored all of his titles with a series of what are called “co-writers” by polite folks—and by people like me, “ghost-writers”.

In the real world, Suzuki’s books are committee-produced books, the fleshing out of carefully-calculated outlines settled by the Suzuki Foundation to secure and hopefully enlarge their support base without offending any subcomponent of it. Because the environmental movement is a mélange of different and often contradictory values, this is subtle work, sort of like political speech-writing, in which staying on point is more important than penetrating accuracy or the resolution of ambiguity: propaganda and advocacy, however warm and fuzzy often trumps complex truth. Contemporary environmentalism is particularly riddled with ambiguities: Suzuki’s brand, for instance, is obligated to ignore the crucial issue of human population control because any attempt to control birthrate contravenes women’s reproductive rights and the values of most of the world’s religions.

The degree of editorial participation the busy Suzuki himself has in producing his books is up for debate, but common sense and a glimpse of Suzuki’s packed-to-the-rafters schedule of public causes and events suggest that his participation in this sort of work is likely to be conceptual and broad-brush, and that the donkey work, along with most of the deep thinking, is done by others. I’m not suggesting that Suzuki is endorsing the books under his name the way Naomi Campbell does, just that writing is neither his occupation nor his avocation.

That Suzuki and his ghostwriters propagandize for causes most people in the arts happen to support tends to obscure the fact that his intentions are distinctly political rather than artistic. Political and artistic merit have, however we might want to cut this, distinctly different protocols, and the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award is supposed to be an award for literary and artistic achievement rendered inside the geographic boundaries of British Columbia. So really, what the hell is going on here, aside from some out-of-control and possibly inappropriate prize flinging?

Awarding the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award to Suzuki appeared to be tied to a publicity op: a fundraiser in Vancouver on behalf of the Writers’ Trust of Canada headlined by Margaret Atwood. The Writers’ Trust, I also note, was listed for the first time as a sponsor of the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Is it the case that the award is a publicity stunt to announce a marriage between the two organizations, one that tries to raise their mutual profile by bringing in Atwood, an acknowledged cultural superstar, to hobnob with environmental superstar Suzuki. As backroom stratagems go, there’s at least decent logic to this: Suzuki gets another campaign medal to add to his CV, Atwood gets a larger audience for her fundraiser, the Writers’ Trust gets some funds raised, and the Woodcock Prize gets some profile without having to give the award to Justin Bieber, who, whoops, actually does write his own material, such as it is. But aside from that, is there anything really objectionable here, except the faint vapours of cynical self-service, hardly criminal in, as they say, a market-driven economy, which is all we seem to find these days when we go casting about for the public realm.

Maybe the right question to ask is this one: what exactly is the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and what is it doing in Vancouver giving prize money to David Suzuki? The Writer’s Trust of Canada—formerly “The Writers Development Trust of Canada”—was created in 1976 by Graeme Gibson, Margaret Lawrence and Pierre Berton to, (according to its Letters Patent) “Promote interest in and the study of literature, and to advance knowledge and appreciation of Canadian writers and literary works.” In the early days, that took the form of promoting Canadian literature as an integral part of the Canadian school curriculum, , among other things, and at one time the Trust spent most of its energy doing exactly that, producing and disseminating educational material about Canadian writers and their works to the various apparatuses charged with educating our children. It’s basically the Disney strategy: capture the kids, and you’ve captured the adults when the kids grow up.

The Writers’ Development Trust was the product of that enlightened period in Canada’s history where politicians and bureaucrats in our Federal government recognized that Canadian sovereignty was much less a matter of having Canadian military planes and ships polluting the Arctic or shooting up foreign tyrants than it was about what images and stories Canadians used to define and describe themselves—and about where those stories originated and who and what processes maintained those images and stories. For the price of a few supersonic jets that weren’t going to protect us from the thousands of ICBMs the Soviets had aimed at the Americans and collaterally at us, Canada was able, inside a couple of decades, to produce its own indigenous culture, complete with authentic images and narratives so dense and local and multiple that we were able to withstand the true threat to our sovereignty, which was the culturally overpowering if intellectually shallow onslaught of images and tropes being generated by the powerful media apparatus of the United States, which was intent on numbing us and dumbing us down into a docile cultural satellite of Mickey Mouse and other images televised-and-American.

As strategies go, this Lester B. Pearson/Pierre Trudeau-instigated national defense by culture building was both wildly successful and extremely cost-effective. The Writers’ Development Trust was a fairly thoughtful if minor part of that larger initiative, and it was, in its way, extremely successful. Partly as a result of its efforts, for a decade or so in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Canadian literature was taught in a substantial percentage of our elementary and secondary schools, and Canadian Literature courses were established in most of our universities. Most of that inclusion has since decayed in our school system, and the ossified university CanLit departments are mostly teaching the same writers and texts they were teaching in 1990 even though nearly all of the original stars, save Atwood, are now dead or irrelevant. Like the rest of us on the liberal/left, the Writers’ Development Trust had the ball—and then tossed it into a cupboard, thinking that the battle had been won.

What I’m saying is that somewhere along the line, the Writers’ Development Trust seemed to lose interest in its educational mandate. Energized by a generous legacy from George Woodcock’s estate, it took to bailing struggling writers out of trouble (it gave out more than $100 G last year to them, there being a lot more writers around to struggle than there once were). But over the years the Trust has also accumulated an array of reasonably generous literary prizes, which it has conferred on the winning writers seemingly without any serious thought to after-the-fact publicity for the books. (Anyone not onto this should compare the three hours of television coverage and other vigorous promotion done for the books and authors nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize with the recent Writers’ Trust Gala, at which the organizers seemed so focused on authors having cocktails with the Trust’s corporate board members and so uninterested in the books being feted that there wasn’t even a bookseller present to sell books.)

Lately, the organization—recently rebadged as simply The Writers’ Trust, has seemingly become progressively more enamoured of the prize podium, and there is a lot of back-channel talk about it seeking to fulfill its mandate to promote Canadian writers and their work by elevating its array of prizes above those of the Giller, Griffin and Governor-General’s both in terms of monetary value and prestige. Presumably The Trust’s sponsorship of the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and the already elevated prize money offered, is the first foray of that general elevation.

Leaving aside the wisdom of shifting the focus of a major literary organization from getting Canadian literature into the core curriculum of Canada’s schools to a laudable focus on the welfare of writers-in-tailspins and then to the market-driven splendours of literary prizes for others to puzzle over, let’s see what we find if we dig deeper into the giving out of the three Woodcocks in one year, two of them to people who, I think we can safely say, aren’t/weren’t prone to have orgasms whenever they manage to land a shapely sentence on the page—thus making them, if nothing else, non-avocationist writers.

The man who has been the driving force behind the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Awards from the beginning is Alan Twigg, who also runs BC BookWorld, which for 22 years, has been the West Coast’s unique and mostly admirable booster of local books, publishers and authors (anyone curious about its uniqueness should check out both its widely-distributed magazine, published 4 times a year, and its huge, opinionated and thoroughly useful database at http://www.abcbookworld.com/ ).

Somewhere in the ABCBookWorld website, you’ll find this explanation of Twigg’s literary and editorial attitudes, which have been aggressively practiced at BC BookWorld: “The general public is understandably turned off by the traditional book reviewing process, because most book reviews tend to be corrupt or tedious, or both. Your average book review consists of one literary aristocrat trying to tell other literary aristocrats how to think. Too often the reviewer is so busy trying to impress the reader with his or her intelligence and writing skill that he or she neglects to pass along basic information about what the hell the book is about.

“Because most reviewers are grossly underpaid, they tend to ‘pay themselves’ by abusing the public platform, co-opting the space as an advertisement for themselves. The public by and large senses this and shuns the exercise. Trouble is, when poorly paid reviewers irresponsibly slag their enemies and support their friends, it’s very hard for an editor to ask for a re-write. Only higher pay will engender higher standards.

“With B.C. BookWorld we evolved a publication that favours lively, up-to-date news rather than opinions. We take a high-brow subject – books – and marry it with a low-brow  format – the tab newspaper. The end result is a middle-brow product that everyone can enjoy and use. It’s pretty simple. And yet when I look at most other publications about books, it still seems to be unique. Why cater to ten per cent of the population, the literary aristocracy, when you can reach the 80% of the population who like to read books?”

This hasn’t quite resulted in plot summaries, quotes from the jacket blurbs and the conclusion that all B.C.-produced books are good ones unless the author has left the province for more than a month or has otherwise run afoul of Twigg. As in every literary community, this one has its darlings and its black sheep, and “positive and fair commentary” may be its laudable ideal, but not always the reality. Yet it is a comparatively healthy community, and most writers in British Columbia have reason to be grateful to Twigg for his efforts.

Twigg’s populism, as reflected in his editorial policy, is typical of a strain of B.C. cultural populism that has been around since the heyday of Social Credit. Twigg himself once wrote a very good biography of Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm, and here, he’s performing the Socred maneuver of more or less openly reserving for himself and his circle of non-elitist middle-browers  the sole right within the pages of BC Bookworld to support their friends and slag their perceived enemies—the “literary aristocrats”, wherever or whoever they are. He does own the magazine, after all, he’s done most of the bloody work, and if you don’t like it, you’re obviously one of those literary aristocrats and you can go straight to hell.  And by the way, Jimmy Pattison operates the same way.

Until now, the recipients of the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award have pretty closely reflected Twigg’s eclectic view of who and what matters in B.C. writing: Eric Nichol, the first recipient, was a humourist and newspaper columnist who mostly wrote for the Vancouver Province. Barry Broadfoot (1997) and Paul St. Pierre (2000) were similarly longtime newspaper reporters—both of them for the Vancouver Sun—before they wrote in longer forms. But then purely literary writers have won the Woodcock, too. bill bissett (2007) P.K.Page (2004) and Audrey Thomas (2003) were or are extreme poets’ poets or novelists’ novelists. Logger-poet Peter Trower (2002) has also been a recipient, as has local historian and journalist-turned children’s writer Christie Harris (1998). The Woodcock selection process has been, throughout, conceptually clear (“There is no discrimination with regards to genres of writing other than all recipients must be authors of books.”) and administratively opaque—another trait of Social Credit populism, as it happens. “Winners” the Award website ambiguously states, “are nominated by letters from the general public. A selection committee consists of the board of directors of Pacific BookWorld News Society”—the same society that in theory runs BCBookworld. It then goes on to offer a non-inclusive list of people who, if you read the careful phrasing, have been on the board, but aren’t necessarily on it now, and may not constitute the entire board, etc. Like I said, it’s Twigg’s paper, and really, the Woodcock Award is his, too—or was until now.

If the Writer’s Trust’s involvement in the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award process has anything to do with the third awarding of the Woodcock in a single calendar year, and if David Suzuki is going to be typical of future recipients, Alan Twigg’s autocratic but at least locally-focused populism is about to be replaced by something rather different. The new way, one suspects, will be much more amenable to big publisher and chain bookstore marketing approaches, not quite to the level of basing awards on unit sales figures, but on a mix of that, exportability, and god knows what else the increasingly corporate funders of the Writers’ Trust base their judgment of cultural value on—and are no doubt bullying the Trust’s officials about at their weekly cocktail parties. I’m pretty sure that the Pacific BookWorld News Society will vociferously defend the selection of Suzuki for this prize, but all the same, tracking the interactions between the Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award’s apparatus and the Writers’ Trust in the near future will likely be, um, educative.

So let’s go back, for a moment, to the slippery slope of conferring the prize on people who aren’t first and finally writers. Both of the latter 2010 Woodcock recipients, let’s face it, are being honoured for their socially-virtuous activities, not for their literary skills. Both awards, particularly the one to Suzuki, endanger the neutrality of the awarding apparatus and make it a de facto political lobby. Whether the corporate CEOs on the Writers’ Trust board will allow this to continue isn’t clear, and it will no doubt soon enough be played out decisively in the back rooms if not the cocktail parties. But here and now, let’s pose a pointed question of a different dispensation, as a general enquiry into the entire culture of literary prizes: is an organization set up to reward and protect those who practice fine literary writing in the process of abandoning those things, and is the abandonment an acknowledgement that such skills are now societally and culturally irrelevant?

To answer this, I think we have to look at what “prize culture” is actually a reflection of, and where it is likely to lead. It seems to me that publishers and writers have been studiously avoiding both the origins and the cultural implications of the prize culture that, in the last decade, has more or less replaced the discourse that once revolved around book reviewing. Notwithstanding Twigg’s notion that book reviewing is—or rather was—gangs of “literary aristocrats” trying to tell one another what to think, it was a key component of the larger collective discussion by which we try to figure out why we do what we do, and where it is going to lead us individually and collectively.  In the absence of that discourse, we’re left, no longer citizens but mere consumers to buy books because they’re “fashionable” or are being hard-sold at us as merchandise.

In practice “prize culture” is a simple-minded response to a general merchandising strategy—instituted primarily by chain bookstores—that treats books as fungible widgets in a narrowly-conceived shelf-space economy. Whether the constant reduction in the number of titles currently practiced by chain bookstores is even a viable strategy for bookselling remains to be seen. Given that bookselling is an information/knowledge based industry, the reduction in the number and intellectual range of titles along with the staffing of chain bookstores with minimum-wage kids who’d just as soon be selling sweaters or automotive accessories, could eventually drive the chains themselves into irrelevance (or to selling candles and bric-a-brac) if not bankruptcy.

The effects of Chapters/Indigo’s trade practices have been documented elsewhere, and are little different than those of chains in other countries, except that in Canada, book publishers must deal with a single near-monopoly. Less well understood are the intangible changes such risk-averse merchandising habits have wreaked on both the psychology of book publishers and book writers, and how much more damaging they are because they involve a monopoly that permits a very small number of book buyers to effectively dictate what books will be published. The situation has already led to a narrowing band of acceptable conventions in both form and subject matter: novels, mainly, usually about either the sort of people who read novels, or what is topical and/or artificially exotic. The result has been the emergence of neo-potboilers that serve mainly to enliven current prejudices and/or cultural fashions, and leaves “serious” literature trailing in the wake of market culture, not acting as its avant-garde.

Prize-driven merchandising doesn’t begin and end at the point of sale. It begins at the book acquisition phase, and worms its way into the heads of editors as well as to publishers’ marketing staff and their sales force. This leaves the entire industry competing for a few prizes, with progressively-narrowing editorial formulae. This will achieve several things, none beneficial. An increased volume of “loser” novels (along with their publishers) will be one consequence; a progressive loss of variation within the fiction that is published will be another; and a third will be generation of writers trying to achieve “perfect” conventionality. “Prize culture” is, in and of itself, a pyramid scheme, as the proliferation of literary prizes across the country suggests. Several prizes, most notably the Governor General’s array of awards, have already lost much of their prestige and have ceased to have significant commercial or cultural impact. As prizes proliferate, the relative prestige and effectiveness of each diminishes, and the race to the top of the pyramid becomes more urgent—and eventually, more vicious.

Prize-focused book publishing and merchandising works against the interests of publishers and writers in several other ways. A little-examined but already visible effect is that it sets everyone—writers, editors and publishers—competing with one another within an extremely narrow band, both in the mercantile and artist sense. One already visible result is an oversupply of highly conventional novels of limited cultural interest that have failed to penetrate the prize zone, and are thus without mercantile shelf life or artistic staying power. What isn’t yet visible are the consequences, in a small diverse  country like Canada, of competing within any narrow and conventional commodity market. Common sense suggest that, given our small population and relatively high labour costs and overheads, that it is economic suicide.

But what matters more than the health of the book industry or the incomes of individual writers, is that prize culture is a recipe for cultural suicide. With a country as culturally diverse as Canada has become, any triumph of conventional behaviors over content and complexity will contribute not only to a concentration on a narrow band of shallow cultural experience, it will lead to increasingly Darwinian competition between partisan enclaves for the attention of the marketplace: a recipe for disaster and an abrogation of art’s inclusive mandate. It will also give credence to already-growing charges that what is getting published in Canada fails to respect or reflect our national and regional diversity, and similarly fails to foster intellectual excellence, which is usually driven by the experimental and exploratory spirits who will be the first victims of a system that mirrors the values and practices of market capitalism. It’s not quite a joke to suggest that Prize culture might be condemning books to the informational preferences of a shrinking demographic of, to speak bluntly, elderly, novel-reading ladies.

My sense is that in the long and even medium term, the current mercantile practice—of which prize culture is a direct product—is something we will sooner or later pay for in several ways: with the cultural irrelevance of books and, in Canada, with widespread bankruptcies amongst Canada’s publishers, with the further impoverishment of writers, and with the further collapse of cultural subsidies. If we’re simply aping global merchandising fads, we won’t be securing Canada’s cultural aspirations accurately or effectively, and we will cease to deserve the subsidies, or the trade protections culture currently enjoys. That said, there’s little I can see to be done about the growth of prize-culture merchandising so long as the current Chapters/Indigo monopoly continues unchallenged, even though following the prize syndrome to its logical end is suicidal in virtually every way I can think of. How to remove the effects of a monopoly or dismantle the monopoly’s trade advantages is beyond current expertise in any branch of political and economic understanding, and it is clearly beyond the political will of current Canadian governments. It would require a degree of market intervention we’re unlikely to see, because it would require greater government perspective and intelligence than we’ve experienced for at least thirty years.

So I guess what I’m saying here is that the Writers’ Trust ought to make a time-out before it embarks on an all-out assault on the prize podium. It should re-examine its original mandate, and ask itself what the real interests of writers (and Canadian readers) in the twenty-first century are, and how best to serve them. Writers themselves also need to do this, and so do book publishers.

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March 30, 2011  4000 words

She interviewed Patrick Crean,  the editor-in-chief at Thomas Allen & Sons, a wholly Canadian-owned publisher which is now, given that McClelland & Stewart is controlled by Random House, arguably the most important independent Canadian publisher; Karl Siegler of Vancouver’s Talonbooks, the most prominent literary publisher on the West Coast for a couple of decades; and Rolf Maurer, long-time CEO of New Star Books, a Vancouver based and nominally left-wing “regional” publisher, which has in recent years become more involved in literary publishing.

In his interview, Crean made the following points (I’m quoting Baird’s interpretation of his remarks).

• There are too many books being published. He was recently on the CC jury for publisher book grants and suggests we could afford to lose half the existing book publishers without any huge loss to the industry. Karl Siegler at Talonbooks agrees.
• There’s too much emphasis on growing talent and not enough effort made to connect books to readers. The monies poured into grants to emerging writers and publishers who publish them are creating mediocrity. We have more talent than we know what to do with and not many people wanting to read the books.
• The sales and marketing departments in the big houses want to cherry pick potential prize-winners, which results in lists with no personality. Patrick says he has never seen a time in publishing with so much risk aversion. He believes the corporate nature that has taken over is destroying book publishing.

Maurer, who was asked to respond to Crean’s points, argued, somewhat quixotically, that there is nothing “wrong” with the Canadian publishing industry; that Canada is a relatively easy market in which to produce and sell books; that what the current market is demanding is more titles, not fewer. He also seemed to think that Crean and Siegler’s call for a reduction in the number of publishers was aimed at publishers like New Star.

I agree, in generality if not always in nuance, with the points Crean made about the state of Canadian publishing. I was asked by Baird to comment on both sets of comments, of which Maurer’s have since been slightly qualified. I have some disagreement with what he had to say, which at several points seems at odds with the specifics of bookselling in 2010, and at one or two other junctures, little more than wishful thinking.

In the real world, publishers are blinking out across the country, as the radical staff reductions and “consolidations” at Random House, McClelland & Stewart, along with the closure of Key Porter, indicate. A fairly large number of small regional publishers, who have long struggled with the bottom line, seem to be falling into a progressively deeper state of crisis, although most of the evidence for this is anecdotal.

For all three publishers, there’s an 800 pound gorilla in the room. It is Chapters/Indigo, which currently holds roughly 75 percent of the Canadian retail book trade. Its trade practices, which include charging publishers for prominent retail display; placing overly large initial book orders coupled with equally large and quick returns; capricious and often messy book return procedures, have bankrupted at least one major Canadian publisher, and have made life miserable for nearly all the others for almost a decade now. Chapters/Indigo’s sheer size and its fairly exact imitation of WalMart’s competitive practices has decimated the independent bookselling sector in Canada, and has changed the way that books are sold in this country, the kinds of books that get published, and even the way that books are valued by the reading public. No country in the world has this degree of market concentration in bookselling, and while it has made the proprietor of Chapters/Indigo, Heather Reisman, much more famous and slightly more wealthy than when she entered the industry, it’s hard to find any other positives.

But Canadian publishers, whether they’re large or small, simply can’t talk about the 800 pound gorilla without risking a blacklist by the notoriously vindictive Reisman and/or the risk-averse marketing graduates who carry out Reisman’s corporate merchandising strategy. These marketing graduates, who do the book buying at Chapters/Indigo, now control not just what books get presented to readers in Canada, but also what Canadian publishers bring into the book market: if a publisher can’t get Reisman’s buyers to carry their titles, their books just aren’t going to get to readers. This situation has given an ostensible advantage to the country’s larger publishers, simply because they can finance the large print runs an artificially-large single buyer demands, and they can finance the unconscionable fees Chapters/Indigo charges for prominently displaying a book.

The virtual monopoly that Chapters/Indigo enjoys  enabled it to secure a number of competitive advantages that regularly endanger the large publishers, and have created a bizarre kind of merchandising monoculture that has sharply curtailed their publishing options. Among the advantages Chapters/Indigo (along with CostCo and Amazon) enjoy is a discount level that exceeds the one given to independent booksellers, and that has reduced the profit margins of all publishers by about 20 percent. But a much more telling advantage for Chapters/Indigo was negotiated during the liquidity crisis that ensued during Indigo’s takeover of Chapters earlier in the decade. This allowed it 110 days to pay for books instead of the 30 days that is common to independent bookstores. Under the negotiated terms, therefore, Chapters/Indigo is permitted to return books before it is obliged to pay the publishers for them, resulting in a situation in which virtually all the books in Chapters/Indigo are there on consignment, and are paid for only after they’re sold. Chapters/Indigo has manipulated this advantage mercilessly, frequently returning books that haven’t sold within the first 60-90 days, and often more swiftly than that: why pay for your stock when you can get new stock for nothing?  If a book didn’t sell immediately, Chapters/Indigo’s trade deal encouraged them to return it to the publisher and order new ones they didn’t have to pay for. That particular trade advantage has lapsed, but despite some improvements in Chapters/Indigo’s relations with publishers,  the “gotcha” attitudes built into any monopoly remain.

I’m not quite sure what Maurer’s motives are for ignoring this in his rosy description of the Canadian book market. It may be the case that he’s never had the opportunity to front-list a title with Chapters/Indigo, and is thus actually more ignorant of the situation that larger publishers like Crean’s Thomas Allen & Sons face than Crean is of the conditions under which regional publishers like Maurer’s New Star Books work, which has trouble getting its titles through the Chapters/Indigo filters at all.

Then there are other elements of Maurer’s declaration of optimism that are equally shaky. To be sure, Canada is a lovely country, and we’re all happy to be citizens. But it is a country with an indigenous literary culture under permanent threat. Canada is, along with Australia, a small player in the world’s largest and most dominant language group, and we are working in an increasingly deregulated international market system that encourages the larger players to constantly and openly attempt to destroy the smaller players by dumping in their market below cost. Maurer would be better to see cultural publishing in Canada within the WalMart model, in which the U.S. is WalMart. This tilted playing field is why cultural subsidies were introduced in the 1960s, why a cultural exemption was negotiated in the Canada/U.S and North American Free Trade Agreements, and it is why various subsidies have continued for Canadian book publishers and writers for the last 50 years. If those subsidies weren’t in place, we would have no book publishing industry in Canada, and he knows this, or ought to. Without subsidies we would have, instead, a few book distributors wholesaling books written by American and British authors, no stories about Canadians for Canadians to read, and little close analysis of our cultural, economic and political conditions.

Similarly, I’m not sure why Maurer wants to minimize the reality of Canada’s geographical distances, and, more important, its culturally dispersed populations. He must be fully aware that the cost of shipping books has quadrupled in the last 20 years, and that a package of books sent from Vancouver costs notably more if is going to Newfoundland or Toronto from Vancouver than if it’s being shipped up to the Chapters Store in, say, Kamloops. I suppose it is possible he hasn’t had that experience recently, and has simply forgotten. The postal subsidy Canadian publishers once enjoyed has been radically reduced, and it now costs nearly the equivalent of the cost of the book to ship a single book from one end of the country to the other. This situation is particularly damaging to smaller publishers, since the per-unit cost of shipping small quantities is far more expensive than it is to ship 50 or 500. Or, 5000, which is the way Chapters/Indigo would prefer to get books—even when they return 3500 of them six weeks later to help the company’s cash flow balance.

Maurer’s argument that Canada is “not particularly awash in books” and that it is middle-of-the-pack in relative terms with respect to the number of book titles published per capita is similarly specious. That he counts, somewhat vaguely, Canada’s position as somewhere in the “low 20s” of 31 countries surveyed when it comes to books authored (or was it published? He doesn’t specify) by Canadian nationals ignores the statistical nuances that ought to be established before we start high-fiving one another. We don’t know what the per capita gap is between the top ten and the bottom ten we’re in, for one, and we have no idea what kinds of books we’re talking about (Harlequin Books is a Canadian publisher) or whether we’re talking about large percentages of our current sales having been written by Lucy Maud Montgomery or the semi-late generation of authors typified by Farley Mowat.

In the same way, his argument that we’ve overproduced for years and so what? is specious in a couple of ways. It ignores the fact that the Canadian book market had far more moving parts and players, and it was generally more profitable before Chapters/Indigo and its marketing graduates gained a near-monopoly and a built-in censoring apparatus. And if someone has been, say, shooting themselves in the foot monthly for 30 years, it doesn’t really follow that continuing to do it is a good idea, or that shooting themselves every two weeks is an even better idea just because the shooter has become desensitized to the pain.

When Maurer acknowledges that “average sales per title have been in steady decline for decades,” and explains that this is “why most publishers increase their title output every year: otherwise, their sales would go down” he’s offering an unintentional look at the dynamics at work in the Canada Council’s block grant system, which gives a substantial overhead advantage to publishers who produce low word-count/print run 48 page quasi-chapbooks that are often barely edited. He’s also contributing, indirectly to the emphemerality of current book publishing, a condition that is partly a result of tax law changes which sees publishers being taxed on their backlist. That, along with Chapters/Indigo’s merchandising strategy of holding progressively fewer titles in backlist has book publishers manufacturing books the same way Maple Leaf foods manufactures those stale-dating cello-packs of pressed ham: More books, smaller print runs, shorter in-print duration. The other contributor is the prize culture that has become the primary means of merchandising books today. Along with artificially concentrating the market, it has made publishing formally unorthodox books virtually suicidal, and so they go, as Crean hints, with formulaic novels-about-sensitive-people-who-read-novels that the book-buyers are comfortable merchandising.  The problem is that most of these novels are interchangeable and boring, and progressively fewer of them are selling: once you’ve seen or read one, you’ve read them all. It’s a suicidal marketing strategy in the long run.

If Maurer (or anyone else) can find a way to put a positive spin on any of this, good luck. His own plan of going with the flow and producing more titles in smaller volumes falls apart when it arrives at the buyers at Chapters Indigo. Since the chain has sharply reduced the number of titles they carry in the last decade, most small press titles these days are simply being turned away. Maybe these extra titles he’s talking about are going to be cunningly disguised as candles or CDs of children’s inspiration music, because that’ll be his best shot at getting product into Chapters/Indigo.

Finally, Maurer’s complaint that Thomas Allen & Sons, Crean and the other larger Canadian publishers are cherry picking their talent from small publishers like New Star is both an inevitability and not nearly as cut-and-dried as he makes it out to be. First of all, writers gravitate to larger publishers voluntarily because only the large publishers can offer them the advances by which they’re supposed to make their living. It doesn’t always work well for the writers nowadays because most of the books that make it through the Chapters/Indigo marketing filters have to follow a formula, and tend towards the er, extremely conventional. Most of the books that get through the filters are being produced by graduates of the country’s Creating Writing factories, which teach their students to follow the formulae created by Chapters/Indigo fairly competently. Such writers are then sent out to operate as the 21st century cultural equivalent of piece-workers.

And as it happens, Maurer is picking on the wrong guy. Crean and Thomas Allen in particular have an unusually good record of publishing writers off the street. When Maurer cites Brian Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut as his example of how large publishers steal books from smaller ones, he’s putting his foot in one he created himself. Fawcett informs me that indeed the book started out as a project for Terry Glavin’s Transmontanus imprint, which New Star published, and was originally meant to be an environmental expose on the 53,000 hectare Bowron Clearcut in Northern B.C.. But when the book began to morph into something well beyond Transmontanus’s 100 or so page limit and its environmental and local focus, Maurer graciously conceded that he couldn’t handle it, and Fawcett took the book to Crean, who did have the resources to develop it fully—and then lost a pile of money on it because it was too unconventional. Fawcett seems to think that it was the marketing department at Thomas Allen that was the villain, attempting to brand the book inside the narrow genre categories the Chapters/Indigo buyers prefer, that caused the disaster by titling it to attract the seven or eight forest rangers still able to read, and the environmentalists, who, when they read it, couldn’t handle it’s non-ideological stance. Fawcett claims this happens regularly because a.) the marketing departments, trying to satisfy the demands of Chapters/Indigo, have overpowered the editorial departments at virtually every publisher in the country, and b.) the same marketing departments don’t bother to read the books they’re flogging. The editors are increasingly powerless.

It’s also worth noting that Fawcett has continued to publish with both New Star and Thomas Allen, and that he has done this for 20 years.  This sort of situation is far more common than Maurer cares to admit.

So what are the big questions and answers being skirted here, the ones beyond the immediate situation? Are we approaching some sort of cultural Armageddon that will wipe out our book publishing industry while transforming Chapters/Indigo into a purveyor of cultural bric-a-brac and scented candles in which a few novels aimed at the diminishing stock of novel-reading little old ladies occupy a small corner of the floor? I hope not, but personally, I can’t see any way past the Chapters/Indigo mess for either publishers or writers.

At the macroscale it is partly the result of the evolution of mercantile capitalism and partly the product of technological changes in media, which together have reduced both the number of readers and altered the attentional choices (and perhaps, capacity) of the average citizen by creating alternative, and largely emotion-based reception and transmission devices for information. Yet another cause is weakening government resolve. Governments across the West have decided their mandate is to act primarily as a component of the economic system and a cheerleader for the corporate sector, and now merely seeks to serve those purposes—whatever they happen to be aimed at at any given  moment. We can also lay some blame on the disintegration of our education systems, which has taught the young little more than how to have a nice day filled with consumer preferences and emotionally-authenticated opinions for several decades, and has transformed our higher education system into a job-training pipeline for the corporate sector, for which knowledge is simply another form of merchandise.

But behind that is the most difficult question of all, one that we have neither experience with, or any perceivable will to answer: what happens to a society that loses the technical ability to analyze and mediate its own activities?  Because that will be the consequence of the collapse of book reading, which is the primary platform for this depth of analysis in contemporary civilization, and the ground of the political and intellectual discourse required to keep the cognitive equipment operational.

McLuhan’s multi-disciplinary committees have failed woefully to do this work. The academic world has degenerated into ideological gang warfare, translating “multi-disciplinary” to “inter-disciplinary”, which is little more than shoals of ambitious professors vying for jargon supremacy.  Newspapers, trying to compete with the Internet and television, have imposed limits on most reportage to 800 words or less, thus obviating any serious analysis of issues. And television, likewise following McLuhan’s lead, has news anchors pestering flood victims and the like for some sort of expression of their feelings. And then there’s the Internet, where unargued opinion and unresearched blogging has supplanted research and analysis.

The trouble is real and profound, and it ain’t going away anytime soon.

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3000 words, October 28, 2010

“It pains me, though,” Levin writes, “that Canadian writers have fallen invectively short. Are we too nice? Too deferential? Sure, there’s no shortage of private whingings, resentments and jealousies, but wouldn’t it be a treat to have, say, Alice Munro opine of Robertson Davies something along the lines of: ‘The man was a blowhard. All that cloudy, mystical Jungianism hung on the slenderest of twigs; and never a character you could faintly believe in.’”

Levin has been the gate-keeper for Canada’s most prestigious newspaper book review venue for 14 years now.  The disingenuousness of what he writes lies in the fact that his own editorial policies at the Globe have been among the principal causes of the shortfall of public hatchet-swinging amongst Canadian writers. If you administer a serious beating to a writer when you review in the Globe, you’re almost always punished for it by not being offered another book to review for at least two or three years. Way back in 2002 I savaged the ridiculously self-advertising Grant McCracken’s Plenitude in a review for the paper, and I didn’t hear from Levin for 7 years. Admittedly, I didn’t call him either, since I was busy and I knew, given the 4 pages of acknowledgments McCracken included with the book, that I was about to make some powerful enemies.

I have some sympathy for Levin here, because he works with a uniquely 21st century hatchet poised above his own neck: newspapers today, with their shrinking readership and advertising base, are under severe constraints in the way they review books. Only the big corporate publishers in Canada can afford to advertise in a national newspaper like the Globe and Mail, and they don’t want their authors savaged because the three or four marketing graduates who do the book buying for Chapters/Indigo (which sells 70 percent of the books in Canada) base their shelf-space allotments on what Levin’s reviewers have to say about newly published books. They read the Globe because it is the last paper left in the country that has a substantial review section.

Ergo, consciously or not, Levin, in an effort to keep his review section from shrinking more than it already has, has learned to bring in the wankers to review books, more often than not knowing that his reviewers have career or temperamental reasons for “being positive” about the books they’re reviewing. It keeps the advertising dollars coming in, and it wards off the bean-counters upstairs, who aren’t interested in discursive cultural fun and have their own kind of hatchets, along with the mandate to use them without the slightest regard to the cultural consequences. That the Globe and Mail’s book section has survived to the degree it has is a testimony to Levin’s tactical smarts in avoiding them.

550 Words February 5, 2010

That said, instead of preparing for the transformative changes that technology and the e-book will surely deliver, the book business as a whole has instead decided to cross its collective fingers and hope that it doesn’t arrive at all. Some have argued that the technology needed for the E-Book to gain cultural traction will never be developed, that the tactile pleasures of the book will prove too confounding for technology to replicate. Others have insisted that copyright and other legalities will prevent the E-Book from hitting the marketplace any time soon.

But who amongst us truly doubts that someone, given the right economic incentives,
will be able to produce a cost-effective, user-friendly iPod-esque platform from which the E-Book will be displayed? Imagine, for a moment, a small hand-held device no larger than a used Harlequin paperback with backlighting, musical functionality, and enough memory to store PDF versions of every book you’ve ever read. A portable library, in other words, with the added benefits of not having to prop the pages open, search for a well-lit spot to read, or picking up the bookmark that keeps falling out from between the pages. A library from
which you could select sentences, paragraphs, or entire sections and forward them electronically, and effortlessly, to whomever you please.

For those who have trouble reading the small print that fills the pages of most books – a group whose numbers will be increasingly steadily as the Baby Boomers, and their eyes, age – the E-Book offers the capacity to increase the font size in proportion to one’s farsightedness. A frequent complaint about the E-Book – the idea of it, at least – is that it would be uncomfortable to read off a screen for extended periods of time. But Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing.net, notes that we already spend much of our time staring at computer screens, be they laptops, PDAs, or the tiny displays on cell phones. A
screen specifically designed for extended viewing would, in reality, be more comfortable than the screens to which our eyes are currently enslaved. Bibliophiles like to argue that the physical characteristics of the book are its best safeguard against technological cannibalization. In reality, they represent its greatest vulnerabilities.

What of the economics, then? The book, as it is presently configured, remains one of
popular culture’s most expensive indulgences, more than twice as expensive as a movie ticket and a compact disc, five times more expensive than a movie rental, and at least ten times as expensive as a music download. Only the theatre, opera, and other live presentations of the dramatic arts exceed the sticker price of your average hardcover book. While the author, his or her publisher, and other assorted middlemen take a small cut, the majority of that sticker price goes, literally, to pulp. As with newspapers, magazines, and other cultural afterlives of dead trees, the single biggest cost involved with publishing a
book is the paper upon which it is printed. Likewise, E-Books would eliminate the need for both warehouses to store the books and distribution infrastructure to sell them. Removing these woefully inefficient variables would simultaneously allow publishers – ethical ones, at least – to pay their authors more and charge their customers less.

There’s also the environmental factor, an increasingly important consideration in any
21^st century discussion. While environmentalists are justifiably busy working to reduce the impact of cars, coal-fired power plants, and excessively flatulent cows, it won’t be long before they target an industry that chops down our planet’s lungs and mulches them into non-renewable doorstops. Paper is, in fact, an enormously inefficient medium through which to transmit ideas and information, particularly when an infinitely superior alternative – bits and bytes – is readily available. The E-Book would allow us to abandon our anachronistic affection for paper while protecting what few trees we have left on the planet, both from getting cut down and from the even more ignominious fate of becoming Rebecca Eckler’s latest “book.”

The supervisors of literate culture, to their credit, have seen the flaws in the defensive strategies I’ve already described. Unfortunately, they’ve decided to cast their proverbial lot with lawyers, an unpalatable decision at the best of times. Copyright law, which protects authors from unauthorized duplication of their work, would ostensibly protect authors from the realities of a digital environment rife with file sharing of all sorts. But, of course, it was also supposed to protect musicians from file-sharing programs like Napster, and we’ve all seen how that turned out for the music industry. While Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster and the Godfather of file-sharing, suffered a nasty beating at the hands of the music industry’s high-priced lawyers, he also created the technological blueprint for file-sharing that remains in use, in a variety of different but equally illegal forms, by millions of people to this day.

The music industry, finally realizing that there aren’t enough lawyers on earth to
prosecute everyone who downloads music illegally, decided to respond by offering cheap, fast, and risk-free downloads of new content. Their losses, while significant, were
ultimately mitigated by this change in strategy. The film industry, meanwhile, adopted a different but equally futile strategy in an effort to combat the effects of technological change in their industry. They began to run advertisements at the beginning of every movie reminding viewers, specifically those with video cameras in hand and the intent to distribute the movie illegally in their heart, that piracy hurt people other than the wealthy actors they saw portrayed on screen. This appeal to the ethical integrity of their patrons was even more futile than the music industry’s excessive litigiousness, and they too have been forced to regroup.

All of this angst over potential piracy problems ignores the fact that piracy has been an integral part of the publishing industry more or less since its inception. More to the point, piracy is and has always been a sanctioned practice in the world of books. What, for example, is a librarian if not the pre-internet equivalent of a file-sharing hub? Isn’t the used-book store merely an inefficient version of Ebay? Each subverts the legitimate book business and deprives the author of royalties through the traffic of second-hand books. Why
a preference for one but a prohibition against the other?

The answer to this entirely non-hypothetical question lies in the industry’s inescapable ludditism, an attitude that is captured by Alberto Manguel’s observation that the internet “dilutes informed opinion with reams of inane babble, ineffectual advice, inaccurate facts and trivial information, made attractive with brand names and manipulated statistics.” Manguel’s opinion of the internet, and more generally the influence of technology on literacy and the book trade, is widely shared among the writers, editors, publishers, and other people that form the literary world’s inner stratum. This is, in other words, an industry that isn’t going to welcome the arrival of the E-Book, or any other significant technological improvement – and no, Margaret Atwood’s “longpen” doesn’t count – with open arms. That’s a shame, both because technology offers enormous advantages and opportunities to everyone within the industry and because the arrival of the E-Book and other related technologies is
both imminent and irreversible. Some might view the industry’s deeply ingrained distrust of technology as valiant traditionalism or a noble resistance against the unrelenting onslaught of change and modernity. A more pragmatic attitude, though, is that adopted by Doctorow, who observes that “predicting the future of publishing–should the wind change and printed books become obsolete–is just as hard. I don’t know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I’ll never find out by turning my back on the Internet.”

Viewed from his perspective, refusing to prepare for the arrival of the electronic book and other related literary technologies is a needlessly reckless strategy. Worse still, it’s one
that may ultimately serve to further marginalize an already marginal industry.

Toronto, May 14th, 2007 – 1,483 w.

One explanation has TVO altering its mandate from public broadcasting to that of an educational programmer—which is pretty much the mandate it started with 35 years ago. It’s a pretty strange response, if that’s what it’s really doing. Ontario’s education system needs teachers in the classroom, not development and inspirational DVDs that exhausted teachers can funnel through their students’ computers, subjecting kids to yet more fake-interactive television while they sleep behind their desks. If it’s being done in the hope of getting direct funding from the Provincial education ministry, it is monumentally misguided. If the McGuinty Liberals transfer one penny from its overburdened education budget every sane parent in Ontario will land on the Network with both feet, because most schools don’t have the budget for computer-equipped classrooms, and may find the TVO-produced DVDs hard to jam into the slots of their broken down classroom VCRs. .

The McGuinty government, which seems generally intent on proving that it is even more heartless and myopically bottom-lining than the previous regime, is no doubt a factor in the cuts. They’ve been threatening the network with both cuts and privatization for months now, not to mention wondering publicly if they ought to, just for the ideological thrill, privatize Ontario’s biggest cash cow, the LCBO. TVO may imagine that biting off its own hind-quarters voluntarily will prevent a larger and sharper axe from falling on its neck. If that’s the strategy, even if it works, it’ll only be a very temporary reprieve, given the underfunded educational sector it is trying to move in on.

TVO is also missing a golden opportunity. In a media landscape in which the private sector’s idea of cost-effective programming is to mount increasingly bizarre and loathsome “reality” shows, and the CBC has dumbed itself down to the point where it sometimes feels like one long episode of the Dick Clark Show, it can be argued that TVO ought to be going in precisely the opposite direction: producing smart public television for the growing cohort of people who are beginning to find television too dumb to watch at all.

Some of the outrage within the cultural community is justified, too. TVO’s backdoor explanation of the cancellation tacitly hints that the cuts have been made in the name of some sort of shadowy formula that justifies programming in direct relation to the dollar value of public and corporate support any given program item can generate—a strange position to take given the network’s ridiculous terms for accepting sponsorship funding, which prevents direct solicitation of support for specific programming unless it comes from a “non-profit” source.

Imprint has been running for sixteen years now, which makes it the longest-running television book show in the English language world. It was originally the brain-child of Daniel Richler’s tenure as arts head at TVO, and while Daniel was hosting it, Imprint was much more than a mere book show. It was—and I’m being exact here—a television show about the cultural and political importance and possibilities of precisely crafted language. Mostly it focused on books and their authors because book writers are—and are likely to remain—the most skilled non-sectarian practitioners of language. But the early Imprint shows weren’t close to an exclusive focus, and the original producers went out of their way to keep their eyes on the larger ball they set out to track, and they created a rare and relevant kind of television from it.

When Richler tired of TVO and was followed as arts head by a series of in-house arts administrators, the focus began to waver. Then Richard Ouzounian took over, and things quickly went south. Ouzounian, who isn’t a bad arts guy if you like musicals and movies from the 1940s, believes that culture means dressing up fancy and listening to violin music, and he likes to keep arts categories where they were in about 1955. He programmed, in other words, for the audiences from the beginning of the Golden Age, when business leaders and governments began to dimly suspect that artists aren’t all neurotic troublemakers who ought to be arrested, but colourful folk who might, if properly channeled and browbeaten at cocktail parties, be good widget producers and helpful adjuncts for the tourism industry. TVO’s senior management, under threat of being privatized by the then newly-elected Mike Harris government and its neoconservative “Common Sense Revolution”, was all too eager to adjust its arts programming to Ouzounian’s tastes, no doubt hoping it would be less offensive to Harris and the North Bay mafia.

Under Ouzounian’s watch, Imprint was softened and sepiaed, right down to the show’s look, which went from hard-edged metallic silver to hearthside oranges and golds. Instead of the spikey-brained Richler and his gnarly successor, Guy Lawson, a series of Auntie-substitute hosts was brought in, and the show became about as cutting-edge as a Heather Reisman sales meeting. The show gradually became another unwatchable industrial showcase, except in this case one that duplicated the characteristics of an industry that is itself in a headlong retreat from public relevance and financial viability.

Canceling it, in that sense, is more euthanasia than tragedy.

Of more substantial interest than the cancellation of a senile arts program, meanwhile, is the degree to which the evolution of Imprint mirrors the evolution of book publishing and distribution in general over the last sixteen years, and what it implies about books—and more profoundly, literary culture itself in the 21st century. We’ve seen, since 1990, a fundamental shift from literature as a crucial cultural conversation to a low-prestige consumer commodity. This evolution, at least in Canada, is startlingly coincident with the rise of superstore booksellers (Chapters/Indigo) as the primary outlet for getting books to the reading public. The two phenomena are clearly connected, but it’s probably going too far to define one as responsible for the other, or vice versa. More likely, they’re both the product of a larger societal transformation that has seen the marketplace become the single arbiter of civil values across Western civilization. Certainly most of the subsidiary phenomena—the destruction of independent local and national production, the creation of distribution and sales monopsonies, and the narrowing range of cultural production and public distribution are characteristic and unremarkable despite their implications.

Most of what got featured in the last years of Imprint was industrial novels and novelists, and the way both were treated was much more related to their widget-value than to their cultural conversational content. Mostly viewers got mind-numbing interviews aimed at further mystifying the productive process for the bemused genre fans and little old ladies the producers imagined were out there glued to their sets awaiting insight.

Hence, a typical late-Imprint interview, only slightly parodied:

Interviewer: So, how did you really feel about character X while you were fleshing out this story, and where do those feelings come from?

Author: Well, you probably know that my great-grandmother committed suicide in 1890 with a blunt screwdriver, and I found the experience of reproducing her agony on the page cathartic. Basically, I imagined her pain, and of course, once I did that the characters just took off on their own, and the story more or less wrote itself. But of course the result bears directly on the general victimization of women, and bringing it out into the open made me feel much more in tune with my own pain after my recent knee-replacement, which was quite painful, as you can imagine.

Interviewer: I’m so sorry for you pain. But has the book sold well? I understand it might be selected as one of Heather’s favourites.

Author: As a matter of fact, I was just talking with the sales manager last week, and he has high hopes for that, and perhaps even for Oprah, but I won’t even speculate about how glorious that would make me feel.

Interviewer: I think the seven prize nominations it has already received are a pretty solid indication of what will happen next. I imagine you’ll be attending the galas. Have you chosen your dress?

Author: Yes, and I’ve even had it made by an authentic Canadian designer, actually. I can’t tell you how gratifying this all is. I feel so, uh, validated, honoured. And with all those presentation dinners coming up, I won’t need to cook for a month. And of course, every dollar means another hour at the keyboard, blah,blah.

However accurate this parody is—and I swear I’ve heard a Canadian writer deliver every one of the above lines recently, along with some far more silly ones—it bears little relationship to the Daniel Richler Imprint interviews , which rarely talked shop, preferring to contextualize authors and their books on a broader cultural and political stage, not on their performance within a shrinking niche-industry. The show, in that respect, cancelled itself five years ago by making itself so slow and irrelevant that its audience tuned out. Its demise really should have us questioning what we’ve turned literature into in our eagerness to get with the Zeitgeist, and it should have the community scurrying to find ways to return writing to the cultural mainstream.

TVO, meanwhile, has a few questions it ought to be looking at. Among the urgent ones are that of the ultimate cost of relating its programming choices to the ideology of a governing political party or to the marketplace, and the question of whether its educational mandate ought to go deeper than sucking up to the Zeitgeist or providing lazy teachers with digital alternatives to real teaching. If we’re going to have public television, it isn’t going to be of much value if it doesn’t at least try to raise the quality of public information and conversation a notch above commercial discourse. If it isn’t willing to try, then it deserves what it will almost certainly get in the near future: sold out, sold off, disbanded.

March 10, 2005 1600 w.

Our secret agent inside Chapters/Indigo has reported on Heather’s recent show-and-tell for the shareholders. Actually, calling him a secret agent is stretching things a little, since he acquired the agency by buying a single Chapters/Indigo share, and that entitled him to attend the meeting. He had some interesting observations—or translations—to report.

Heather’s new plan for the bookstore megachain’s solvency is to transform it into a chain of “cultural furniture stores”. Books will occupy no more than 65% of the floorspace and will account for about the same percent of sales—or less, if possible. That’s down from the current 80-85%. Insider intelligence suggests that a key element in the plan is to reduce the number of titles per store to 15,000. No doubt some marketing genius has mathematically demonstrated that this is the right number of titles to have in stock for maximum turnover and profit.

At the core of this calculation lies a fundamental and continuing misunderstanding of what a bookstore is. In the Chapters/Indigo view—old as well as new—a bookstore is an outlet for fungible commodity merchandising, not an information-based service business. Simply formulated, Heather appears to believe that a successful bookstore is one that profitably distributes the maximum volume of book units, even if they happen to be all one title. Better, in fact, if they are all one title.

The counter argument—currently backed by government policy—is that a bookstore is a cultural institution. To be culturally useful—which is to say, to increase multiple-source citizen knowledge and to widen and sharpen the level of discourse beyond binary disquisition—information must be specific, complex and accurate. The volume transferred is of secondary but not tertiary importance. Ten thousand units of The DaVinci Code, a book which is a pernicious fabrication of theoretical conjecture, platitudes and half-cooked history grounded more or less exclusively on the Shirley MacLaine philosophical platform that supposes that “everything that happens, happens for a reason,” does not have the cultural value of say, 10,000 units of books written by a variety of authors: Susan Sontag, Modris Ecksteins, Joseph Conrad, and so on. Surely I don’t have to explain why this makes it culturally useful.

Still, it is worth pointing out that the technical philosophy of marketing ignores cultural calculations on principle, thus demonstrating the accuracy of Jane Jacobs’ formulation of human society in Systems of Survival, and what happens when the balance between culture and the market gets out of whack.

Cultural Furniture

Our agent was going to ask Heather for the corporation’s definition of this term during the AGM, but quickly discovered that shareholders don’t get to ask questions. Our best guess at what it means is this: candles, incense, book remainders and coffee-table books, greeting cards, mood music and other New Age lifestyle junk. We note, for instance, that books have recently been displaced in counter displays with branded tap water in plastic bottles.

But if the intention is to up Chapters/Indigo furniture sales from 15% to 30-35%, our suspicion is that they’re going into computer sales and other electronics, and that the stores will soon be hard to distinguish from Future Shop. At first glance, this shift toward Future Shop opens the possibility for a re-emergence of independent booksellers.

But wait! Heather also announced plans for a new round of store expansions. It remains to be seen if this is merely a case of brandishing the Wal-Mart club at possible new competitors, expand-or-die capitalist mechanics suppressing common sense, or a clever manoeuvre to get out from under the Competition Bureau restrictions so she can sell the chain to the always-lurking Barnes & Noble. Our agent believes it is all three and that whatever Heather may intend, the real promise is one of more dead book publishers.

Killing Coles

Heather also announced that she’s planning to kill the Coles chain of bookstores, renaming it “something else” (the current code name is “Indigo Lite”, which is, we suppose, corporate irony). Coles, of course, is more associated with student study cribs than with the candles and incense that are Heather’s great love. One analyst we talked to believes that the rebranding is occurring because the chain’s colour scheme, yellow and black, is the traditional code for caution and restrain. This signalling is inappropriate for any instrument of today’s corporate culture, and the wrong message to be sending to prospective consumers. Someone else suggested that the colour scheme doesn’t go with Heather’s living room décor, and that her collection of Cole’s Notes don’t look good in the new Schwartz family book case in Rosedale.

737 w. October 22, 2004