Yes. Thank you, Madame Chair.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having us here.
I'm Matt Williams, vice-president at House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books in Toronto. We are an independent trade publisher, and we publish books for readers of all ages.
Anansi is now over 50 years old, which is venerable for a Canadian publishing house. Since the beginning, we have been known for publishing new Canadian writers and helping those writers establish, build and sustain their careers. We publish Canadian poetry, short stories, novels, drama and non-fiction, with particular attention to the work of indigenous writers and the work of writers from French Canada, whom we publish in translation. We publish the novelist Monia Mazigh, who is also present here today. As you said, we'll split our allotted time.
At Anansi and Groundwood, we work with some 500 different authors, illustrators and translators. Author remuneration is central to our thinking and our activities.
Here's our model. We pay authors royalty advances as a way of financing their new work, and we pay ongoing royalties on sales. We sell our authors' work into many different markets—bookstores, libraries, K to 12, post-secondary, and export. We publish books in multiple formats—print, audio, and digital. On every sale we make, we pay part of the revenue to the author as a royalty.
Since the 2012 changes to the Copyright Act and the widespread adoption of the self-declared fair dealing guidelines by Canadian educators, we have seen a steady decline in revenue from Canadian educational sources. From 2013 through this year, the drop in revenue has been close to $200,000. That amounts to a drop of around $100,000 in author royalties. Over that same period, our income from educational sources outside of Canada has held steady. There has been no drop in author royalties there.
We are fully digital. We make and sell e-books and audiobooks. These are discrete digital products, each with a set retail price and a defined marketplace, and we pay royalties to our authors on all those sales. However, selling in digital form into Canadian classrooms is not so much about selling discrete products with price tags: We are licensing parts of books or stand-alone artistic works. We are licensing content.
Educational institutions used to pay for the use of a poem, a short story or an excerpt from a book through a system of collective licensing, an efficient model to manage payment for use, but that system has now been largely replaced by the educators' fair dealing guidelines, which have effectively removed the payment obligation. Our material is still being taught in classrooms across the country, but the payments have dried up.
Much of the material that is delivered to students, especially in a post-secondary setting, is in digital form—for example, via scanned excerpts distributed through a university's learning management system. I would like to emphasize strongly that this is just fine with us. We contract with our authors to publish their work widely and to find as many readers for it as we can. Canadian teachers and Canadian students are, to us, highly valued readers. Classroom use of our content for successive years and even generations of Canadian students is our goal.
The other part of the deal with our authors is an undertaking to earn them royalties and contribute to their livelihood, and that is where developments since 2012 have let us down. The post-2012 demise of the collective licensing model has removed what we might call the “cash register moment” from the Canadian educational licensing market. We no longer have an agreed mechanism whereby use and reuse of material in a form that is convenient in the modern classroom—and I particularly have in mind material in digital form—will generate royalties for those who worked to create it. I think that if we agree that Canadian content has value, then we should stand by a model that allows that value to be realized not only by the users but also by the creators.
We made three recommendations to this committee as part of our written submission. For time reasons, I will reiterate only the first one. It is that this committee work with the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology to clarify fair dealing provisions to help restore our ability to realize a return on the ongoing use of our work. We believe that a return to a system of collective licensing will go a long way towards achieving that end.
Thank you for your attention.