Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. My name is Kate Edwards, and I serve as executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers. I'm joined by Glenn Rollans, ACP president and co-owner of Brush Education, an independent publishing firm based in Edmonton. Together, we acknowledge that we're meeting today on the unceded traditional lands of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
ACP represents 115 Canadian-owned, English-language book publishers active in trade, children's, literary, scholarly, and educational publishing. Our members are independent businesses, and operate in communities from coast to coast. We publish books that serve local and regional interests, and also those with broad appeal that reach audiences across Canada and around the world. Although our market has changed rapidly over the past decade, our members continue to adapt to technological change, and now produce books in a full range of digital formats in addition to print and audio. Canadian-owned publishing firms are responsible for roughly 80% of the new books published by Canadian authors each year.
Our industry's success has been made possible in part by strategic investment on the part of the Government of Canada, for which we are grateful. The support of the Canada book fund, a program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, remains essential to the health of a competitive domestic book publishing industry. The fund has been instrumental in stimulating independent publishers' successful transition to digital, and their continued pursuit of export markets. Its programs are well-administered and results-oriented, providing strong economic returns and high cultural value. The fund's annual budget has remained at $39.1 million since 2001.
This committee recognized the need for new investment during last year's pre-budget consultation, when it recommended to Parliament that the fund be increased. However, budget 2017 did not include an increase, so ACP maintains its recommendation that the annual budget of the Canada book fund be increased by $15 million per year, to a total of $54 million.