Thank you very much.
My name is James Lorimer. I'm the publisher of Formac Publishing in Halifax and the CEO of another publishing company, Lorimer, in Toronto. My colleague, Errol Sharpe, from Fernwood Publishing, who's involved in the project I'm talking about, wanted to be here today, but, unfortunately, he's ill.
I'm speaking on behalf of Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions, which is a non-profit consortium of five independent publishing houses. Actually, I feel like I'm kind of an add-on to the session earlier today because what I have to talk about is what was being discussed in the earlier session.
For the last three years, the five of us, the publishers, have been working on a project to offer middle ground in the polarized conflict between Canadian universities and Access Copyright. We think the middle ground is to make it appealing, easy, and affordable to buy chapters of our books for course use. You can go onto our website, which is up and live now, and see how this works. It's www.canadiancoursepacks.ca.
On our platform, course instructors can search the chapters in the books published by our firms and by other Canadian publishers on the social sciences and humanities. When they find a chapter that looks interesting, they can get a short abstract of its content, and they can read the whole chapter right on the website.
Each chapter is priced, and the cost averages 10¢ a page. The course instructor can select the chapters they want to use for the course and put them together in what's called a course pack. The course instructor gets a unique identifier for the course pack to take to the university bookstore just like they take the title of a textbook they are requiring their students to use.
The bookstore orders copies of the course pack from us. If they order a digital version, the bookstore pays a package price of about 10¢ a page, so that would be $30 a copy for a 300-page course pack, which would often cover all the reading material required for a single course. If the bookstore orders printed copies, they pay a few dollars more, six or seven dollars more, for the printed bound copy. Our option puts the course instructor's selection of chapters into a university bookstore printed and bound for $36 or $37 a copy. With its usual markup, the bookstore would sell the package to the students for about $50.
This option compares well to standard university course textbooks, which are now priced, as you probably have already heard, at $50, $75, $100, $125, and up. To summarize, the middle ground we've developed is a digital platform for publishers to sell individual chapters for course use at reasonable prices.
We're well aware that most Canadian university administrations have implemented a policy that the course instructors and students—you were hearing about this earlier—can take chapters of our books for free and use them in courses. They use a guideline of 10% of the original book, usually one or two chapters.
We realize the alternatives to this 10% policy, which have been open to the universities today, are awkward, frustrating, and expensive. One alternative, paying the excess copyright tariff, is very costly to universities, and it doesn't connect directly to use. The other alternative, assembling permissions from rights holders for each individual portion of a book and negotiating fees for each item in the course pack, is awkward, expensive in staff time, often frustrating, and unpredictable in terms of the bottom-line cost.
Our project aims to break through the current impasse between the universities and Access Copyright. We think university administrations can believe that the education exemption is fair and may use them to take our chapters for free, but still opt to advise course instructors and bookstores to use our platform and purchase course packs that they can sell to students. Why would they do that? Because, as I've said, our option is easy for course instructors to use, requires no staff time for copyright clearances, produces reasonably priced course materials for students, and leaves universities free of the risk that in a few years the courts will rule that they should have been paying.
We do believe that when all is said and done, the courts will find that fair dealing under the Copyright Act today does not allow universities to take our chapters for free.
Even if the courts determine that it has been fair use up to now, we expect they will find that it's no longer fair use to take chapters for free when they can be easily found and purchased at reasonable prices on an easy-to-use platform aggregating thousands of chapters from hundreds of books from many leading Canadian publishers.
Nevertheless, I am here today to ask you to recommend that the act be amended. The request is for an amendment to clarify that when portions of a copyright work are readily available for purchase at reasonable prices, fair use does not encompass taking them for free. While we believe that the courts will ultimately make this determination based on the Copyright Act as it stands right now, that process may take many more years. Conflict on this issue will continue unabated. You've been exposed to lots of that in the hearings you've had up to now.
Incorporating clearer and more definite language in the act would likely encourage universities to move away from their current hardline stand, and to accept a middle ground resolution.
If there's time in the discussion to follow, I'd be happy to brief you on the initial responses we've had from the 35 universities we've approached since January to brief them on our platform and on our middle ground resolution around using copyright material for courses.
Thanks for the opportunity to tell you about our course pack project.