Fixed book pricing (FBP) has been a topic seen rarely on the agenda of some politicians in Canada. Quebec’s Minister of Culture tabled a provincial law back in 2013 for a FBP. Meant to bolster the province’s book industry, it used the model from France. It’s model made it illegal to discount a book more than 5% off the cover price.
France also followed suit with another law to support local bookstores by making a mandatory shipping fee (€3 for orders under €35), known as an ‘anti-Amazon’ type of measure.
Critics of FBP in Canada did not seem to refer to France’s successes with the law. France’s FBP is one of the reasons that the 3,500 independent bookshops are surviving. These bookstores also employ more than 12,000 people, as reported in the Guardian by Angelique Chrisafis, September 23, 2022.
The UK had such laws in place to protect publishers, writers and bookstores with these FBP but chose to scrap them in the ’90s. As prices started to soar in the production of books recently in the UK, these discounts, that UK residents were used to for 20 years began to hurt the industry.
As an interesting fact, the International Publishers Association said back in 2013 that markets like the UK, where discounts were prevalent, bestsellers accounted for over 15% of sales. Whereas in France for the same year, only about 2%.
Here in Canada, that is where you see the big discounts too. Book bins, discount stands in grocery stores, racks in big box stores, all have huge discount stickers. What types of books are these: bestsellers.
To show why FBP would only benefit Canadian bookstores, publishers and writers, let’s take a look at how much Canadians use discounts when buying books according to the Canadian Book Consumer Study of 2023:
- In 2023, more Canadians (61%) paid full price for a book than in 2022 (55%), 2021 (56%), 2020 (55%) and 2019 (55%)
- In 2023, less Canadians used a coupon (4%) than the previous five years to buy a book (5%)
- In 2023, less Canadian bought books that were discounted (24%) as compared to 4% higher in the previous four years
- and in 2023, less Canadians (3%) bought a book as part of a multi-year discount as compared to 4% for the previous five years