When you think of “independents,” usually bookstores come to mind. If you didn't know that Edmonton houses an independent publisher, you were in the same boat as me. Glenn Rollans is the co-owner of Brush Education, an independent textbook publisher for post-secondary education. I meet him for an interview at Brush’s office south of the University of Alberta.
Brush stretches back forty years to a company called Det Selig in Calgary. After years of working in K-12 textbook publishing in French and Aboriginal languages, Glenn bought Brush with business partner Fraser Cely in 2011. “It had grant eligibility, some backlisted cash flow, and it was really ready for a rebuild,” says Glenn. “There are quite a few independents in Canada, but none of them doing what we’ve taken on as our particular specialty, which is medicine and healthcare textbooks…. A part of my pitch is that most Canadians, when they talk about our culture, identify our healthcare system as one of the key features that distinguish a Canadian in North America. Every aspect of educational publishing is about reference points like that, which makes it a cultural enterprise that I’m interested in, and which allows our company’s borders to be across Alberta, Canada, North America, the world…..In fact, we’ve just sold a pathology book to Turkey for publication in Turkish.”
As Glenn puts it, publishing is something akin to film production. A publisher brings his project from inception to completion, but not without his crew at hand (or, all the suppliers and services together). But “publishers are not printers. They buy print services. Sometimes a publisher sits quietly and a project arrives that he decides to take on, but more often there’s you and your team developing a notion of a project, which, after matching the right services, turns into a project. You also look to have editorial and production services, marketing, illustration, cross-device compatibility, and sharing of the money, enough of which you hope is left over in order to do it all over again.”
So that’s a part of what Brush does, but what exactly does it mean to be an "independent" textbook publisher? It means they’re not part of a larger conglomerate like Nelson, Pearson, Springer, Wiley, and Bertelsmann Publishing -- companies which otherwise dominate most of the Canadian education publishing market.
Brush’s niche in medical publishing helps differentiate them from the bigger companies, but Glen also notes the necessity of being “an active digital publisher in order to make it here... Essentially all of our books have simultaneous digital additions--you try to reach your readers wherever they are, and that’s really the current state of book (and textbook) publishing: audiences have not grown but their expectations on price have really contracted because of available information that’s free online. We try to reach everybody wherever we need to.”
When working on a typical timeline, Brush has at least ten projects on the go. “A typical textbook has from 10-40 authors, depending on the genre, type, scope, size, etc. But if it’s a professional series, like the canine one that’s had many editions, the publishing process is familiar and streamlined (under a year). A pathology one, with 32 authors--almost 2 years.”
Brush works with the University of Toronto Press for warehousing and distribution on a contract basis. “Because UTP represents a lot of different lists, they’re usually able to make sales that are above stated minimums, which often are 25 books to achieve a certain discount, which is an advantage of being a big distributor. Most of our orders are consumer size, but those consumers are finding the books through Indigo or Amazon. Sometimes the orders are in the hundreds, sometimes the tens.”
Despite there being printers and binderies in Edmonton (such as McCallum) it’s still said that there are no binderies in Edmonton. Glenn explains that “there are no economically efficient ways to bind in Edmonton. Economies of scale are at work there. So the print industry in Canada is mostly in (Ontario), Manitoba and Quebec. And in those provinces there are lots of options. We always quote a project out to more than one supplier there.”
Brush uses a digital work formatting system called XML-First Workflow when they’re developing a book. "The goal with that is to be able to push it out to any output technology. So you have generically coded content whose application will survive any kinds of changes, which lets us repurpose content for different formats. For example, we’re working on our first app with a pathology book, much of whose information comes from the original format the book was in.”
The idea behind repurposing the format of eBooks in the print industry, especially for independents, is that you can’t really “start-over” in digital. There’s often not enough money to start over. Repurposing with a format like XML is more efficient than building from scratch all of the time. “But what we do now,” says Glenn, “is a tagged, generic file that has all of the elements there, including formats for high-quality release mediums whether digital or print. Whatever we were using then, a short while ago, we’ll be able to read and repurpose them now. Backwards compatibility is essential.”
Occasionally Brush will take on a project out of the blue, but they’re risk investors. “Whatever we work on takes time away from what else we could work on, and the goal of a publisher is to have projects that take care of you instead of the other way around. You can’t look at a book and simply say it costs X amount--you have to look at the reference points, the ecosystem of distribution channels of that potential product.”
When asked what he thinks most people in Edmonton read, Glenn responds: “first important point is that most people aren’t readers, at least not book-readers. So I would say for the world of popular text that most are reading online, and if the question is popular print, then most people are discovering in-person in places where print is available. Libraries are a good example, bookstores…. But they’re reading what’s on the bestseller list in Toronto and New York. If you run your numbers, that’s what you’re going to see. If you look at the bestseller list in the Edmonton Journal, for example, those lists are being assembled out of independent bookstores (Audreys in Edmonton, for example). That’s a very different picture of the book world than most people encounter. Most people encounter the book world now through Chapters/Indigo and through Amazon….Honestly, the companies with the strongest promotion ability are the ones that float to the top.”
Looking to the future with the company is not a matter of principle, according to Glenn, but audience. “Up until now, at every level, print is still the driver in the marketplace in terms of what the audience wants. Post-secondary it’s over 70% preference from students, and K-12 it’s still around that for total use, and in the trade marketplace it’s similar.” The prediction a few years ago was for eBook sales to outrun print, “but that’s not the case now. People like print, and in education it’s very effective. People remember books and find their way in them.”
