Canadian booksellers are struggling, but not in the way you might think

Erik Ko actually had some good news coming out of the pandemic. While most entertainment industries saw reduced business and closures, his actually saw a bump. 

With movie theatres, nightlife and restaurants closed, people instead turned to the more solitary pursuit of reading — and lifted a long-suffering industry to a level of popularity not seen in years.

"The demand all of a sudden, like doubled, tripled," explained Ko, co-founder of Manga Classics and CEO of Udon Entertainment — both Ontario-based publishing companies. Though he said the market is just about as good as it has ever been in the 20 years he's worked in it, there's a problem, and it's shown most clearly by one of their best sellers.

During an interview with CBC News, Ko holds up one of his company's biggest hits from this year: a manga adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. 

"It is one of the most popular titles that we have, and we are out of this," Ko said, shaking his head. "It's going to be next April before we can actually get stock back." 

Ko is far from alone.

While booksellers around the world want to sell books to readers, and readers are hungry to buy them — in 2020, both the United States and the United Kingdom saw their largest annual increases in over a decade — a worldwide paper shortage and a global shipping crisis mean they're having a difficult time keeping up with that demand.

In Canada, while total sales in 2020 decreased due to widespread retail closures and cancelled new releases, ebook sales trended upward. According to BookNet Canada, COVID-19 is no longer severely limiting book buying in 2021, and readers are now specifically looking to buy more physical books from physical bookstores.

Paper mills inundated with new orders are also facing a pulp and paper shortage, and are struggling to deliver paper quickly to printing companies, who themselves have more orders than they can manage and can't outsource them overseas due to the worldwide shipping crisis.

Ruth Linka, president of the Association of Canadian Publishers and an associate publisher with Vancouver's Orca Books, said that every year, they wait to see if any of their titles make it onto award lists and school reading lists — something that invariably bumps demand. They usually order more books to meet that demand and receive them within a couple months.

This year, several Orca titles made it onto the Forest of Reading school list — the largest reading award program in Canada. But that required extra printing for two books, (Heart Sister by Michael F. Stewart and Riley Can't Stop Crying by Stéphanie Boulay) which wasn't able to be done on time, so they were removed from the list. 

"It's frustrating because, you know, we put two years worth of work into getting a book. And before that, the authors put in who knows how many years writing the book," Linka said.

All of that work comes down to a small window of marketability for most of their books, usually only a couple of months. "Or maybe, if we're lucky, a few years in the market." 

Problems brewing for years in the book industry erupted into a full-scale storm during COVID.