Since the closing of Edmonton’s first independent bookseller in 1975, Audrey's Books has been the city’s primary independent bookstore for forty years and counting. “In Edmonton, we are the last independent bookseller proper,” says Steve Budnarchuk, who has been working at Audreys alongside his wife since ‘88. I sit down with him for a chat at the coffee shop next door to Audreys’ downtown location. I want to know the history behind his store and work and gain his perspective on authors, publishers, manufacturers, and distributors. He buys me tea.

Compared to Chapters/Indigo’s mega storefront and online business model, Audreys’ model works simpler and locally, which means more face-to-face contact with other book industry professionals on a daily basis. “We end up doing a lot of the difficult work, sourcing new, obscure books from obscure sources, and now, increasingly, out-of-print books too,” says Steve. The big companies “have different business models entirely. When you’re operating out of a warehouse and not a storefront, you can discount your product heavily, but this undermines the value of books and the way people think about how much the artist should be paid for his work. If all media/art is free, then the creator isn’t being compensated.”

Before any book ends up on Audreys' shelves, an author is taken up by a publisher willing to invest in it. “If they decide to publish it,” Steve says, “they’ll do some market studies first, checking with their retail customers to see what they think, which has gone on for many of years. But they (the publishers) don’t consult us much anymore; we’re too far down the totem pole in distribution. In terms of market share we (independents) were probably never more than 20%, and now we’re just a fraction. The chain stores are up there though (Chapters, Walmart, Costco, etc.); you don’t have to go far to find some feedback online from their market studies on how a book will do locally, internationally, etc., within their chain. We’re just gravy; if they sell some through us, great, but they’re looking to the chains for the big numbers.”

When the publisher finally decides they’re going to produce the book, they find a printer. “These days printers are becoming publishers too. An example is a company out of Manitoba: Friesens Printers. They used to be exclusively western, but now everybody uses them. They also have a self-publishing addition where they’ll take your idea and help you publish it, and they’ll even market it for you, put it on their website, essentially become direct sellers too. But the whole business is becoming homogenized in that sense. Everybody’s trying to sell. Penguin/Random House, the merger of two of the world’s biggest publishers, recently became so in order to compete with Amazon, and now they can talk on level ground, which is a huge chunk of the business. I get deliveries from Penguin/Random House daily. They’re vertically integrated, so they distribute their own books. But they don’t print.”

Once the book has completed the printing stage, a printer such as Friesens ships the books to the hired distributor who then delivers them to designated stores. “Sometimes Friesens directly ships, bypassing the distribution stage, but that’s because of timing: for example, they’ve printed for a publisher and we needed those books for an event ASAP, so they shipped direct from Friesens to us.”

Examples of third-party distributors used often in Canada are “North49Books in Eastern Canada, Raincoast on the West coast, and a smaller one in Kelowna called Sandhill--and they all distribute for others. Distribution is usually exclusive. If I’m on the West coast and I’m distributing a particular book series, then no one else is."

These distributors might also take on other roles, explains Steve. "A distributor such as Raincoast may act as seller too, distributing that book that no one else has to chain stores and independents alike. But Raincoast also wholesales: they’ll buy from Penguin/Random House, and then sell to me. They do a fair amount of that, non-exclusively. Anybody can do that if they want too. A distributor such as North49 is strictly wholesale, nonexclusive. They just buy and sell, from various publishers and distributors to other booksellers. They don’t sell direct to the public at all; Raincoast doesn’t really either. But a company like Raincoast has been all three: publisher, exclusive distributor, and wholesaler.”

Sometimes a wholesaler or distributor won’t have the books Steve is looking for, so he orders from the publishers directly. But if all the books in Audreys' had to come from different independent publishers, there would be a ton of invoices to sort through. “If I want a batch of books from several independent publishers across Canada, I go through a company such as LitDistCo., who works for the Literary Press Group (LPG), and all they do is distribute. They take this bushel basket of small literary presses across the country and they warehouse their inventory all in one place so they can send me one order of books at a time. That way I don’t have to deal with all of the different small presses/publishers just for some books, which is very uneconomical.”

Sometimes he has to go through another popular distributor such as George Terminal Warehouse (GTW), who separates the publishers into different invoices for the sake of price on their end, but in most cases LitDistCo. is his first choice.

There aren’t infinite ways to get a book; you hook up with a company and get distributed, one way or another. “But it’s complicated in that those relationships change constantly. UBC was being distributed out of George Town Warehouse/Publications under this umbrella of Unipress--but they left. So now they go over to University of Toronto Press who is a publisher that also distributes for other Canadian Presses. That’s the nature of the changes.”

In order to help the Canadian book industry deal with the online management of retailing, ordering, creating, and transferring of book data in all of its various formats, whether for eBooks or print, a nonprofit organization called Booknet Canada was created in 2002. “For me,” Steve says, “they provide a communication service. Yes there’s email and such but what you really want is EDI (Electronic data interchange) between customer and publisher, and BNC facilitates that. A lot of our purchase orders run through BNC, which in turn I think routes through PubEasy (by Nielsen) in the USA, and then they go to individual publishers’ mailboxes, where they’re either manually or automatically picked up and dumped into their computers. So, once I’ve created an order on my end, no one has to touch it again until the invoice is being printed and someone in the warehouse is packing that order."

"BNC help reduces errors and provides for faster, seamless throughput of data. In exchange for that, BNC collects the data about book sales across the country from voluntary participation by people like me, but I don’t participate yet. We’ve chosen not to, for out-of-date reasons now. There were times when we really didn’t want to share our sales with anybody because we thought that independent booksellers sharing their information helped chain stores determine what to sell. And it does. But, do they (chain stores) need independent bookstores sales info to get that kind of detail? Ultimately, they’re going to get it anyway.”

What does Audreys face in the future? “The industry is concentrating," Steve says. "There are fewer and fewer big publishers, printers, and distributors. Sometimes it leaves a little bit of a vacuum in which other small publishers may spring up in order to fill a niche, but not a lot these days. So many people are selling direct now instead of going through a bookstore like Audreys. Years ago Penguin or Random House would never be selling to the public, but now they are, in a big way. They claim they don’t want to be competing with us, but in today’s market it’s inevitable, primarily because people will discover websites like Penguin’s after following their favourite author’s book online. Sometimes the online searching will lead to us, but mostly it’s the big ones like Amazon, Penguin/Random House that grab their attention.”

By now, we’ve finished our drinks. Outside, rush hour begins. Before thanking Steve for the tea, I ask him what he thinks most people in Edmonton read. He isn’t quite sure how to answer the question. Fair enough. When’s the last time you saw someone reading? On transit? At school? Where did they get it from? Probably not from Audreys, according to Steve. “I think most people are still buying their books from Chapters. The biggest entity of book distribution would have to be Chapters/Indigo because there’s just so many of them, plus their online presence….Are people reading books mostly? Still? I can’t answer that question properly because I don’t know that I really know. Our business is pretty stable right now, so people are buying books from us. But we’re also selling toys, games and puzzles in order to stay afloat--to stay liquid.”

Unsurprisingly, digital reading also has an impact. “Albertans are early adopters of digital culture, so there were a lot of people brought into that reading channel. But that’s kind of peaked too. I think the people that really want to read digitally, are. It’s not entirely plateaued but it’s not climbing exponentially either. It’s more inflation area now, based on population growth and that sort of thing. Publishers have seen that, that eBook sales haven’t increased, that it’s kind of started to level off. Why? I don’t know. Certainly the younger community is not being introduced to books the same way they used to be. Schools aren’t doing it for us anymore; school libraries are being neglected in favor of laptops and tablets in the classroom."

"In my circles, everybody I know is introducing kids to printed books. And there’s still lots of evidence that it’s way more important for them to read print than digital, in terms of learning patterns and retention and all that sort of thing. Bookstores might go away--that could happen, if we switch over to buying everything online. It may become harder and harder to keep bookstores running. The younger generation: they want everything dramatized for them so they can absorb things passively. The printed book is still a different entity, and it may survive a long time yet, until it becomes too uneconomical to keep printing it.”

Last Updated: Jan 3, 2017