Bill C-11 committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for this opportunity to address you on behalf of the K to 12 educational publishers sector. My name is Greg Nordal and I'm president and CEO of Nelson Education, Canada's largest publisher in this segment. We have roots in Canada goi

Bill C-11 committee  Sure.

Bill C-11 committee  Sure.

Bill C-11 committee  I think the more we do in the world of digital, the more we would help that situation. If you have an access code, for example, you could have access to a classroom. So a science teacher might find a remedial learning opportunity if the language skills aren't appropriate for the

Bill C-11 committee  Correct.

Bill C-11 committee  There is a wide range. I think the solutions for many years to come will be of a hybrid kind, increasingly digital but with a mix of text. On the development side, the costs attached to developing a learning resource come to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost

Bill C-11 committee  We're so far away from digital that it's only accurate to a point. Less than 10% of K to 12 today, by my estimate, are equipped to use digital. I have talked to schools that are very equipped. We've done pilots in schools. We've learned a lot about some of the challenges—access v

Bill C-11 committee  We have to meet challenges for today as well as tomorrow.

Bill C-11 committee  Yes. We support a number of institutions. If a visually impaired student wants the materials, we provide them through our repository, centrally managed. Certainly a lot of our digital products—there are very few of them in use today—have audio components for the hearing impaired

Bill C-11 committee  Absolutely, and that's exactly what we're looking for. It's troublesome, it's well-intended, and we get it. We support the need for an exception, but as it's currently written, it's the promise of ongoing litigation and uncertainty for publishers. We employ thousands of Canadian

Bill C-11 committee  It's a risk that people will no longer take, and in many cases the amount of margin in a small market, where we have to compete with fellows like Mr. Swail here, who is a fierce competitor.... It's a very small market, and we know if we don't get 50% or 60% of the expected market

Bill C-11 committee  It will vary by project. In some boards it is the board that will make a decision on a board-wide basis. In many cases it's school by school, and on custom projects, on which we do a lot of work, smaller provinces—for example, Newfoundland or P.E.I. will want a very specific text

Bill C-11 committee  Sure. For example, Ontario will come up with a curriculum requirement in science. We'll decide whether or not it's a viable business case. Science is very expensive. There are a lot of digital assets, photo images, and so forth. We'll invest x hundreds of thousands of dollars, as

Bill C-11 committee  They often are. What is happening more and more is hybrids. What's going on with the amount of digital sales in K to 12, notwithstanding the obvious progress that's being made, is literally minuscule, and based on current funding for schools for hardware, infrastructure, and gett

Bill C-11 committee  That happens today all the time. We'll sell an e-book that goes with that printed text. You could somehow prevent just sending out 300 copies through some digital mechanism, but what mechanism is there to prevent photocopying half of this particular book? I am not aware of any me