Thanks very much.
I'm probably the one you're going to have to shut up, because I'm not reading from a prepared statement. I'll try to stay within the time limit.
I really appreciate the chance to talk with the committee today. I've been a working writer and publisher for about 30 years. I'm a partner in Lone Pine Publishing, a company from Edmonton that works across Canada and the United States. We're a member of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta and of the Association of Canadian Publishers. Both of those associations are among the groups that Roanie mentioned as signatories to the document concerning issues around fair dealing.
But I recognize that today we're talking principally about opportunities and issues in the digital environment. I wanted to mention that my background includes recently being a partner in Les Éditions Duval, an Alberta-based educational publisher in the K to 12 sector, and also a former director of the University of Alberta Press. So I have a fair scope in terms of academic issues in publishing, educational issues, and issues in what we call “the book trade”, which is the bookstore world of book publishing.
And in digital issues, education is well ahead of the trade. Perhaps 20% to 30% of that sector is now in a digital format. As early as 1995, Les Éditions Duval did three levels of Cree language education as interactive digital resources. In contrast, Lone Pine, at this stage, has more than 300 titles of its list of about 800 titles in e-pub forms, but we haven't released any of those editions into the digital marketplace.
That's not because there aren't opportunities there. I see the digital world as having some really spectacular opportunities. I think in education we've seen that resources can be not just more portable but more effective. They can have more functionality built into them. They can potentially be more beautiful. I think design in digital environments is coming along.
The questions around whether they can actually support professional producers are unresolved. For Lone Pine at this stage, the reason we have 300 or 400 works in digital form but haven't released them is that the rules of that marketplace are, I think, significantly underbaked at this stage.
If Canada is going to be a leader in the digital economy, in my mind we have to be a leader in copyright protection for producers of original resources. That includes writers and visual artists, and publishers, who have a creative role in the creation of resources. Where people hold copyright and are secure about the rules in the marketplace, I think they're going to be very energetic participants.
In the book trade, we're only about a 1% to 5% digital economy at this stage, and that's different from sector to sector. In scientific, legal, technical, and medical publishing, it's a much higher percentage than it is in the book trade. Even in the trade in general, there are hot spots. Romance, for example, is a hot spot for digital resources, and office workers tend to download them at lunchtime. You can see these incredible spikes in the download rates for some publishers at lunchtime. There are matches for certain kinds of reading.
In the trade in general, my sense is that publishers are going to participate more confidently in digital business if they're adequately protected. That means having some expectation of reasonable compensation and also some expectation that, when they let the cow out of the barn in digital form, it is going to both improve access and improve, in a sense, their business possibilities. The business that a publisher does flows through to its writers, designers, editors, salespeople, and retailers. It has huge spinoffs and it's important to protect those, in my mind.
I do want to talk specifically about fair dealing, so I'll come to the end of my presentation and just mention our view on the role of collectives as well. I think collectives like Access Copyright or COPIBEC have a huge role in this economy.
Lone Pine has huge opportunities because we are a natural history publisher and a gardening publisher. We have huge opportunities in the digital world to disaggregate content and repackage it as applications or small downloads for users. This is a really common opportunity in education as well.
In an expanded fair dealing environment, the expectation of users that small uses will be uncompensated I think goes way up; this is what we've seen in some of the test cases in the United States, for example, under their fair use environment.
As publishers, we're often charged with not entering wholeheartedly into digital business models or not creating them. Those models exist, but they're not functioning very well, and they won't function well until there is confidence in the publishing world in entering that market. They'll function for people who are creating works as part of their ordinary employment as an instructor or professor, but they won't function for people whose profession is writer, illustrator, photographer, or publisher.
If you expect a business model that runs on micro-tariffs, then micro-uses have to be compensable. They have to be paid for. If they're not, and if a higher proportion of uses are small uses, the undercutting of the revenue base for people who make their living in this world is going to be pretty extreme. and many of us won't be able to make a living.
I think that in the fair dealing and expanded fair dealing environment we're going to see some sectors test the limits of fair dealing very strategically and with a cost-benefit approach to it. Large educational systems. like the provincial ministries, and large educational institutions have already shown that they are very interested in this issue. I see it as ironic, because for the knowledge and information they want to access and that creators want them to access, it's a two-way street. There's no satisfaction in being a writer or a publisher if you don't have people using your material.
But if we enter that world and are dealing with primary customers who are showing an interest in having a larger and larger proportion of their content delivered for free, the irony is that the very knowledge they're seeking—when it comes to a transaction in money terms—is the thing they put the least value on. They're paying for ISPs, which are huge players in this economy. They're paying for professionals, for information professionals and libraries and so on. They're paying for the devices they use: the projectors in classrooms, the hand-helds, and the computers.
Everything in the system is paid for up to the point to where what is a relatively modest expenditure—the expenditure, as Danièle mentioned, on educational content—is where they draw the line, where they don't want to pay.
As a parent with three students in university, I can sympathize with the expense issue. It's very expensive when you think in terms of dollars spent. In value terms, I think of the value received. In grade schools, we're spending annually across Canada only about $50 per student on educational resources. In universities, where it approaches $1,000 per year as a proportion of the educational budget, the value that's returned is enormous. I think the value equation has to be kept in mind as well as expense.
I think Roanie mentioned that expense can be a bit of a canard in this discussion, because when you talk about millions—and Danièle mentioned this as well—millions are big numbers, but when they're matched against billions that are spent, are they too big a number? When they're spread across the community of creators and publishers in Canada, I think the record is that those are underpaid professions, and the issue starts with how much we're spending on those things.
So we do see a very strong association—or I see it personally—between advocates for expanded fair dealing or for increasing the number of exceptions in the Copyright Act. For example, an educational exception would completely undercut the educational publishing world. That prospect is one of the reasons that I'm not an educational publisher anymore.
But we see a connection between that and concern about collectives, so I want to emphasize just in passing at the end of this that when I hear about Access Copyright or COPIBEC from the outside, I hear about them as monolithic institutions, agencies that are bullying the system. They're very small in comparison to the system and they are true collectives. They're places where we come together, so that when it comes to litigation, which is a terrifying prospect for me under an expanded fair dealing environment, we have a chance to pool our resources, and when it comes to licensing, we have a chance to pool our resources and bring some order to a system that needs order.
Expanded fair dealing is a place where the rules will be very unclear. I think the relationship of mutual interests between users of copyright and creators of copyright really demands good fences. Good fences make good neighbours. What I'm looking for in what comes down in terms of the new copyright is those good fences: clarity definition, not open-ended definition.
Thank you very much.