What is the future of Canadian publishing and bookselling, or, Can Chapters/Indigo survive?
There are two obvious ways of projecting a future for Canadian publishing and bookselling. One, the cultural nationalist approach, would be to rescue Stoddart/General’s mess by emergency-granting out some of the debts, including, perhaps most crucially, those owed to the small publishers who were distributed by General Distributing. But to make this work beyond the immediate crisis, Jack Stoddart would have to want to stay in business, which he doesn’t. Even if he did, substantive revisions in the deal struck between the Competition Bureau and Chapters/Indigo—and in the general practice of book distribution—will have to occur for any sane prospective buyer to want to dig Stoddart’s companies out of the hole they were in. From a bookselling perspective, changes are also needed. The very least of these is to level the playing field so that the huge competitive advantage incurred by Chapters/Indigo’s 110 day payment schedule (lately reduced to 100 days) disappears. Arguably important is a
