At Lone Pine, we've invested in preparation for it. But in the book trade, we're still in a defensive stance. We're concerned about letting the horse out of the barn, because digital transactions are such a small part of the marketplace at this point—1% to 5%. It's not that we're persisting in an old business model in the book trade: we're persisting in the current model. If 95% of buyers are buying in paper form, even though digital opportunities are there, you can't not take care of the print world.
That said, my experience in both education and trade says that people are really excited about the digital opportunities. We want access, we want people to come to our material, and we want them to find what they need. We want them to use it in new ways, with searchability and built-in functionality that are not possible in print. But we need to find a way to be compensated for it.
If you're like me--and I think many of you are—I have an iPhone on my hip, a laptop in my bag, and The Globe and Mail in my other bag. None of this stuff goes away, and if the industries are being asked to produce in all of those formats for a declining revenue stream, something has to give. It's not just a reluctance; it's not being technology-averse that stops us from going there. It's that the marketplace has to come to it for us to be able to invest in it. And for the marketplace to come to it, we need clear rules that tell people what's free and what's not free.