The ongoing story of Canada’s attempt to get US publishers to drop the Canadian prices of books continues anew, as the Globe and Mail‘s Marina Strauss reported yesterday on a meeting held last month where booksellers expressed their concerns about the high price of U.S.-produced books sold in Canada. The retailer’s research showed that those books were about 30 per cent more expensive here than in U.S. stores, largely because of outdated exchange rates used to calculate Canadian prices.
Which didn’t exactly make them too happy. “In some markets, consumers have been complaining about the price and, realistically, some of the prices are still poor,” said Steve Budnarchuk, co-owner of Audreys Books in Edmonton and past president of the Canadian Booksellers Association. “The price discrepancy is just too high.” But there’s some relief in sight as last week, some major publishers that distribute U.S. books began to offer retailers 5 per cent discounts to take into account the soaring loonie. That’s on top of publisher reductions of up to 20 per cent last year. It doesn’t completely take into account the loonie resurgence, but it’ll do for now – until the next round of complaints, that is…