As the loonie dives, book prices hold steady

As the loonie dives, book prices hold steady

It's a good time for Canadians to buy books, even as the Canadian dollar has hit its lowest level in three years, because the prices on book jackets were set when the loonie was roughly on par with the U.S. dollar.

Canadian publishers were criticized last year for not adjusting book prices quickly enough when the Canadian dollar hit par. At the time, the Collected Works bookstore in downtown Ottawa was one of the first to sell books at the lower American price. But the store's co-owner, Christopher Smith said on Thursday, as the dollar started to drop again, that offer has to end. "We said we really can't continue this model of par pricing, because we'll just go out of business," Smith said. The dollar's now fallen to below 80 cents US, but again the price on the book jacket doesn't reflect that.

Prices are set and printed months before the books hit the shelves. That means that right now, books are a bargain," Smith said. "Like Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem, it's $29.95 US, and it's $31.95 Canadian. But, if I went at today's [currency] rate, it should be $39.95 Canadian. That's a 10-buck difference. That's another book," Smith said.

As a retailer, Smith said, he's not the one taking the hit for that price difference. "I'm glad that I'm not a publisher," he said. Harper Collins Canada publishes the Stephenson book. The publisher's CEO, David Kent, watches the exchange rate every day, because most of the books it sells are imports from the United States.

"We import 75 per cent of the books we sell," he said. "The difficulty for us is, when we adjust price, you won’t see it on books in the stores for a month in advance ... right now U.S. books are a tremendous bargain, priced less than they would be in the U.S.," Kent said.

"This is the perfect storm [for us]. Consumers not rushing out, the value of our dollar just dropped. So basically, we have a double whammy. The only thing we can do is look at our costs. The last thing in the world I want to do is put someone out of work."

If prices go up, Kent said, it won't be on the book jackets until the new year, after the busiest book-selling season.


Last year in December, I posted a vent about how the difference between Canadian and US book prices were so bad, the US publishers were making all the profits and the Canadians were being gouged. At that time, the Canadian dollar and the US dollar were at parity - they were both (more or less) the same value. And it stayed that for the most of this year.

But in the last 2 months, the Canadian dollar has dropped in value so much and so quickly, that the book prices are still lagging behind. Canadians can buy books at US prices even through the Canadian dollar is NOT currently at equal value with the US dollar.

Making books is fun - to watch - in 1947

As I was doing my rounds of the blogs, I came across an old video about Book Production. From Philiobiblos comes this comment. From 1947, a very interesting (and unintentionally amusing) short documentary (10 minutes) on the long, very involved process of creating a printed book.



The original video submitter wrote this - Back before inkjets, printing was a time-comsuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book. Nowadays, any crabby person can sit at home and crank out stuff on a blog or even make internet video. This movie will make you happy as you watch others toil for 'The Man' under primitive conditions.


As I was watching all these people doing the non-interesting tasks - like moving pages, covers and books from machine to machine, I was thinking - "This is make work for the people. The machines do the real work. This is communism". If I had been employed there, I think I would have been bored. I'm also thinking thats why communism failed. Because machines do all the work now - not the people.

Now of course you are going to tell me that America was never communist. Of course not, but that particlar publisher factory in 1947 sure looked like it. Now of course this is also after the War and at the end of the Great Depression. The economy needed to be ramped up. The way to ramp up an economy is to produce (consumer) goods that the people will buy. And people will buy books. So the more books you make, the more they will buy.