A few weeks ago now Lloyd Alter posted about his frustration with Indigo. It seems the mammoth bookseller continues to charge those high "Canadian" prices on books when the U.S. price is considerably lower. On my way to the office this morning I walked through the Bank of Montreal Tower and in front of the Indigo there was this sign:

It looks like Indigo must be feeling the pain of consumer complaints on their pricing. My personal favourite point is: "Although customers may pay with U.S. currency, we can only sell at Canadian prices." Is the worm of Canadian pricing about to turn?

1. Great capture, Robert. My own favourite line is “We are working diligently with publishers to … drive lower prices on upcoming releases …” Great. Problem is, this has been at the core of Indigo’s strategy pretty much all along, and has regularly been cited as a significant factor in the gutting of Canadian publishing. One recent example is Sandra Alland’s essay, “Was this book shade-grown: Towards fair-trade Toronto lit” (published in The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto (Coach House, 2006) examining (among other things) the impact of the Chapters/Indigo policy on Canadian publishers.

   To be fair, publishers do set the prices on book jackets, and while the issue of Canadian book pricing relative to the rising dollar has been around for some time, the most common differential I see on trade paperbacks ($24.95 CDN; $18.95 US) has not changed very rapidly. Smaller and independent Canadian presses appear to be far more responsive to price/dollar fluctuations, however, or so it appears from the small / independent press books I’ve been buying lately.

   However, it is an evasion for Chapters/Indigo to blame publishers for a CDN dollar-related price differential when they are the major source of the far larger problems of price discounting and payment terms that can damage smaller publishers and distributors. Moreover, the price you pay at the cash register may have little relation to what the bookseller paid a distributor/publisher for it. Chapters/Indigo can also afford to discount prices at the point of sale—something it does regularly when it advertises new releases at 30% off.

   But book buyers, too, are part of the problem for demanding these same deep discounts at the point of purchase, even if it exacerbates all of the above problems and cuts authors and independent Canadian publishers out of profiting from their own work.

   What’s a fair book price? I don’t know. But I try to avoid the problem by buying directly from independent publishers and from local, independent booksellers whenever possible.

   I have to admit having a soft spot for Chapters/Indigo, however, because for several months earlier this year (and perhaps continuing into the present) the Eaton Centre Indigo had two large and prominent table displays of Toronto authors and books and novels focusing on Toronto. It’s the only local bookseller I know to have done so.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  10/25  at  05:02 AM

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