On his blog, Hugh Mcguire asks “What if the Book Business collapses?”
It would be a disaster for the armies of Canadian publicists. Mayhem for the distributors, printers, and book designers. What of the book sellers? What of the Canadian library system?
Would we have to recycle all of our old favourites?
Would we have to book cross already loved stories instead of churning out new fables with unbent covers?As an author, I should panic at the thought of the Canadian book industry imploding. Yet as a reader I find comfort in the idea. Weird.
Somehow, and maybe this is me being naïve, … somehow I think we’d revert to the oral tradition. I think we’d get back to storytelling.Reading has become a solitary pursuit (save for book cubs). Yet when sharing a story you are never alone.
So … what if the book business collapses? What if no single novel is printed in Canada in 2009?
Jobs will be lost; this is certain and regrettable. You can bet that Harper won’t be bailing out the book business if that happens. Indie bookstores would close if they couldn’t keep old favorites in stock. Literary agents would migrate to the US. Canadians wouldn’t get Rebecca Eckler’s next book in the hip mommy series “My Kid Lost her First Tooth and I can’t Find it!”
No new books.
But think of the stories we’d tell.
Tags: canadian book industry business collapse, Canadian fiction, Canadian yummy mommy, Rebecca Eckler
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Canadin book marketing, Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.