Evidence of meeting #28 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was book.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you for that opinion.
Thank you, Mr. Simms.
Ms. Guay, go ahead, please.
4:10 p.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chong. It's a pleasure to see you again.
Good afternoon, Mr. O'Hearn. Good afternoon, Ms. Kopak.
You're talking about book technology. I'm going to tell you a brief anecdote.
My father is 81 years old, and I believe he knows more about technology than I do. That's simply because he has a disability and is almost blind. Consequently, through the Institut Nazareth, with which you are no doubt familiar, which is an association for the blind, he is able to obtain books on cassettes and compact discs, audio books.
So that's very good for him. He can continue engaging in one of his favourite pastimes. However, that's not my concern.
Instead my concern is for young people. Technological development raises problems everywhere. I know that, in some regions of Quebec, there is no high-speed Internet, or the system is not yet completely functional. That's the case in a number of regions. It must also be the case across Canada.
So it must be harder to establish a system such as yours. People may be less interested. What's your opinion on that point?
Technological development has to progress, and it's very slow. Efforts have been made with regard to the Internet for years. I have it at home, but the people in the neighbouring municipality don't have it, and they don't elsewhere either. So this situation is causing some problems. There are also bottlenecks.
In addition, with regard to comic books, what are you doing to digitize that? Reading a comic book as a book is quite different. How are you going to stimulate young people's interest? That's important.
4:10 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
Yes, I'm thinking of my children.
4:10 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
Absolutely.
There's no interest in comic books because there's no movement; things aren't moving. People obviously prefer to have a book.
4:10 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
That's it, yes.
4:10 p.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Earlier you said that Europeans don't really have any interest in e-books, but you know that Europeans love their books very much. A book also has a market value. An old book that has been preserved for years will have a certain sentimental value, but also a market value. I don't know if a book on diskette will have the same value. That also comes into play. Perhaps that's why Europeans are book lovers. In public places in Europe, in Paris, for example, they go looking for old books, interesting books, and they love to be able to hold a book in their hands and to read it. It's a completely different attitude.
For young university students, on the other hand, the vision is completely different. It's much quicker for them to search for a book on the Internet when they do their homework. They can determine very quickly whether they've reached such and such a chapter, paragraph or page. That's probably faster than if they had a book in their hands.
4:15 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
I agree.
4:15 p.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
It may cost less too because university books are often very expensive.
4:15 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
It's definitely less expensive. That's also related to the way subjects are taught because, if teachers decide that children are going to read articles, for example, rather than read an entire book, that's something else. They prepare course packs. That encourages one way of addressing a book without it really involving a book as you describe it, as in Europe, for example.
As I previously said, a book, in Europe especially, but also in Quebec, is a cultural element, I believe, more than in the English-speaking world. It's virtually impossible to imagine a book fair such as Montreal's Salon du livre in Toronto. That's virtually unthinkable. People visit the Salon du livre de Montréal with their families. The same is true in Mexico. People go to the book fair with their families. It's different in Toronto.
4:15 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
I believe so.
4:15 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
We're simply making comparisons. It's somewhat different because it depends on the type of book, on geography and culture. These are all kinds of factors that make people accept or not accept e-books.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you, Ms. Guay and Mr. O'Hearn.
Mr. Del Mastro, go ahead, please.
November 4th, 2010 / 4:15 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I had an interesting tour today. I went through Ericsson in Ottawa west and saw some of the things they're working on. It really is remarkable to see how much power is going to be put behind the devices that we're using every day, the speed at which these are going to be able to operate, and the quality of the broadcasts that will be available. It's really quite fascinating.
They expect the total number of connections to the Internet to increase to 50 billion by the year 2050, with multiple devices owned by everyone connecting in many different directions. I think that's the challenge: how do we take advantage of the 50 billion connections that are thought to be possible by 2050? That's what we're really talking about here today.
Mr. O'Hearn, the Association of Canadian Publishers has been quite clear and quite strong in its support for modernizing the Copyright Act. I know that if we go back for generations, the profitability of the industry was always based on selling the book. You needed to have content to make a book, but the profit was all made on the sale of the book.
How do we get from selling the book to selling the content and making sure the industry works for both the authors and the publishers? Ultimately, how do we advantage Canada in that fashion?
4:20 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
I wish I had all the answers to that one. That's really the crux of the issue, exactly the way you've put it. I read something somewhere to the effect that the publishing industry really hasn't changed much in 500 years. It's just starting now to have to take this seriously.
You're quite right; it's the selling of the content in book form as we would understand it. That's where the money is made, and it's shared out from that. Of course, we're somewhat like the record industry, I suppose, thinking we can do the same thing with electronic books. Again, the jury is out on that, because a book, like anything else, is still subject to file sharing. There's always somebody who can break a lock. It's fun. It's not for me--I'm hopeless at it--but I think these people just find it's fun to do that kind of thing, and they'll find a way around it; it doesn't matter what you do.
Again, that's what I was saying a bit earlier. We're doing an experiment anyway, providing books free in a certain electronic format, which is basically PDF. We're also using a fancier electronic format, EPUB, which you can actually do something with; we're selling that one, and selling the print book. We want to see if having the PDF available for free will have any effect on the sale of the other books, but we don't know yet. We've just started the experiment and we're going to run it for a year or so.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Thank you.
I would suppose, though, that your support for the Copyright Act, not to digress into something.... But the modernization remains fervent. That's something you see as critical for the publishers.
4:20 p.m.
Director, University of Ottawa Press, Association of Canadian Publishers
Yes, it has to be. Even the way we deal with authors.... It's all completely changed, and we're still walking our way through that and trying to find the best way to do it.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Thank you.
Ms. Kopak, I see a few colleagues around the House who have made the plunge and picked up what you have by your left hand, an iPad. I suspect we're likely a couple of months away from every one of us walking around with BlackBerry PlayBooks and stopping with stuff like this everywhere, which will be another significant evolution here on the Hill.
How is this changing education? How is it changing learning? How is it changing how people are communicating? In your capacity, you must be seeing some very profound changes that are happening very quickly. Even for some folks who aren't that old, the rate of change is almost unsettling at times, isn't it?
4:20 p.m.
Director, Business Development and Operations, Great Northern Way Campus
I've been in digital media for 20 years, and the iPad and the tablet technology are the biggest things I've seen since Netscape in 1995.
My father is 91 and in a nursing home. I downloaded a whole ton of family pictures that I had digitized, brought them to the hospital, and showed them to him on my iPad. My dad was just totally.... You see, it's got a recorder on it, so my dad actually got to tell me the stories of the photographs of the family. That's a personal thing, but if you think about it in the context of cultural history and think about the potential of what this thing can do and the fact that we now can walk around with all this material that we can show people and share, it's huge.
A year ago I would have laughed at myself for thinking that this would make such a big difference, but it's just so easy to use. The best thing is that when you go to a nursing home and you're showing these photographs and getting people to talk about them, it's so cool. It's not the technology; the technology is an enabler. It's actually the content and the communication that's the cool thing about the potential for these things.
It's funny, because I worked in CBC archives for many years, and I'll tell you that if we can get archives onto these things and start getting people to talk about some of the images and to tell the stories behind some of the history that's sitting around, it would be a very cool thing.
4:20 p.m.
Director, Business Development and Operations, Great Northern Way Campus
It's just easy; it's cool.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you very much, Madam Kopak.
Thank you, Mr. Del Mastro.
Do any other committee members have questions?
Mr. Pomerleau.