JAMES ADAMS
From Monday's Globe and Mail
October 7, 2007 at 9:26 PM EDT
Depending on whom you ask, Toronto-based Indigo Books and Music has cornered at least 65 per cent and perhaps as much as 80 per cent of the Canadian retail book market. And now, according to some industry observers, it's positioning itself to become the dominant player in supplying non-text books to school libraries in Ontario and possibly the rest of the country.
The concern among some wholesalers, distributors, independent booksellers and school librarians arises from the Sept. 19 announcement by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty promising that, if his Liberals gain a second term in Wednesday's provincial election, he will provide $80-million in new funding for books for Ontario school libraries over the next four years.
Under the scheme, Indigo is to be the sole supplier of books to school libraries. Indigo says it will provide these books “at cost” – meaning that “any books purchased [by school boards, individual school librarians and teachers] will be purchased at our cost,” an Indigo spokesperson said last week. “The intention is for us not to profit from this initiative.”
Indigo founder and CEO Heather Reisman strongly lobbied for the Premier's commitment, and even appeared alongside McGuinty when he made his vow at Indigo's flagship store in downtown Toronto. Reisman said she hoped other provinces would emulate the McGuinty model, and indicated she would be approaching other premiers and provincial education ministers to join the cause.
It's the Indigo connection that irks the educational book sector and has raised howls of protest in the waning days of the provincial election campaign. Eleanor LeFave, president of the Canadian Booksellers Association and the owner of Mabel's Fables, a modest-sized children's bookstore in Toronto, said last week that “it's quite fantastic that [Reisman] got more money out of the Premier.”
Anne Ledingham, national sales manager for Mississauga-based S & B Books, a wholesale supplier of books to school libraries nationwide for 28 years, calls it “a wonderful gesture.”
But they both warn the exclusivity that's been granted Indigo is according to Ledingham, “short-sighted of the Premier and ignores a regime of suppliers that's been efficiently supporting school libraries for decades.
“Any wholesaling business is going to be small margin. Our rule overall is to make 20 per cent somehow,” Ledingham says. She predicts that if the deal goes through by the turn of the decade, “there won't be a man standing in the school library market — or a woman for that matter.” Except Indigo which, for its 2006-2007 fiscal year, reported net earnings of $30-million.
Members of the CBA and education wholesalers held an emergency meeting last Friday in Toronto to discuss the issue but are waiting for the results of the election before deciding what to do. This week they'll be arranging meetings with the Premier, the education and culture ministers and the Ontario School Library Association.
“What we really don't want is one supplier to our public libraries,” said LeFave, whose own store has sold books to more than 100 school libraries in Ontario. She and Ledingham are concerned that Indigo may lack the expertise in curriculum-related book selection and sourcing, invoicing, cataloguing and processing that wholesalers and community-based booksellers have developed over decades.
S & B Books, for instance, has a supply contract with the Peel District School Board, one of Ontario's largest education jurisdictions. Indeed, S & B “estimates that 80 per cent of our educational business comes out of Ontario.” Part of that contract requires S & B to first send books bound for elementary-school libraries to Duncan Systems Specialists, an Oakville company that laminates the books' covers and affixes catalogue and loan data to them.
“It is a very strange sector, it's so alien from the retail market,” said Ledingham. “So why set up a whole new model that I don't think will work . . . to the satisfaction of schools and boards?” In fact, the CBA's LeFave and James Saunders, vice-president of Collingwood-based Saunders Book Company, a distributor to wholesalers and libraries since the late 1960s, argue McGuinty should “just give the $80-million to the librarians. They know the curriculum; they're in close touch with the teachers; they know what's missing.”
For their part, the Liberals say that the “investment [announced Sept. 19] won't preclude schools from continuing to make ongoing purchases of library books as part of their school budgets.” But Ledingham doubts this will happen: “If the government gives every school library in Ontario that money, then every principal in this province will say, ‘That's it. I don't need to spend any other money elsewhere.' ”
At this stage at least, Indigo has no plans to set up a dedicated educational division. Said Lisa Huie, the company's manager of public relations: “I don't think that's a corporate initiative we'd agree to venture into . . . I don't think that's necessarily (a) our role and (b) our position.”
She added that the deal likely would be orchestrated through Indigo's corporate side, and not through the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation, which Heather Reisman founded as a charity in 2004. Since 2005, the foundation has given $150,000 each to 30 high-need elementary schools across Canada for library books.
Asked how long discussions between the Premier's office and Indigo had been going on prior to the Sept. 19 announcement, Huie said: “I don't think discussions with the Premier per se date that far back.” More time was spent on Writing on the Wall, a recently released documentary on Canada's literacy “crisis” that the Love of Reading Foundation commissioned at least a year ago.
