Jean-Benoît Dumais, chief executive officer of Les Librairies indépendantes du Québec. The network gives shoppers access to a richer trove of titles than any one shop might have available.Renaud Philippe/The Globe and Mail
For more than a decade, Les Librairies indépendantes du Québec has been trying to reconcile the buying public’s expectations of fast, frictionless online shopping with the pause-worthy personal touch of local bookstores. The association’s website LesLibraires.ca has become a digital empire of indies, letting readers peruse the combined stock of 124 Quebec bookstores.
The network gives shoppers access to a richer trove of titles than any one shop might have available, while still highlighting bookseller recommendations – and offering low shipping rates that puts it in the same conversation as Amazon and Canadian-bred chains such as Renaud-Bray and Indigo. All that’s missing, really, are the in-person book launch parties and the knowledgeable shopkeeper who’ll riff with you about the latest Miriam Toews title.
Now the rest of Canada doesn’t need to feel left behind. Over the past few months, the team behind LesLibraires.ca has built a nearly nationwide confederation of independents and launched an English-language website: Booksellers.ca.
So far they’ve added more than 30 shops from eight additional provinces, broadening the reach of each store and, in some cases, letting the businesses tap into lower shipping rates – sometimes significantly lower than they’ve ever had access to.
“When you pool resources, everybody wins,” said Jean-Benoît Dumais, the Quebec City-based chief executive officer of Les Librairies indépendantes du Québec.
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His team has spent the past year and a half working with the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association to recruit bookstores outside of his province. If they can reach their goal for the next two years of adding nearly 100 anglophone shops, Dumais reckons they could have the market power to truly compete with Canada’s biggest physical bookselling chains.
Including Quebec members, the tally is already about 160, which brings the association close to conglomerate-level competitors on at least one metric: Indigo says it has 172 physical locations. Quebec’s Renaud-Bray lists 37 locations, and its sister bookseller, Archambault, says it has 14.
McNally Robinson, which operates three stores in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, was quick to join Booksellers.ca. Co-owner Chris Hall said he was impressed with how LesLibraires.ca built itself into an Amazon competitor in Quebec.
“Being anywhere in the same conversation is compelling,” he said, with the caveat that the rest of Canada is a much different marketplace than Quebec.
That’s because while independents depend on enthusiastic local communities – the people who want friction in the form of familiar faces and trusted literary advice – Booksellers.ca is an opportunity to attract shoppers looking for speed and ease who might otherwise default to Amazon or top-ranking Google search results.
With the Booksellers.ca team pushing hard on search-engine optimization to get the site in front of potential buyers, indie stores stand to benefit – potentially significantly.
“If we can be just as convenient for them, or even more convenient for them, then I think that’s a win for the entire industry,” Cole Davidson, the co-owner of Ottawa’s the Spaniel’s Tale, said in an interview.
It’s a well-worn trope in the anglophone arts sector to lament how much better Quebec is at supporting homegrown culture – and given that the province’s school boards are required to buy books from accredited local sellers, the support for bookstores is practically intrinsic.
The grassroots origins of LesLibraires.ca only further validates the cliché.
The initiative got its start, in a roundabout way, through another form of physical media: a magazine. Quebec City bookstore Pantoute launched a literary journal in 1998, which, within a decade, “became the voice of booksellers in Quebec,” Dumais says.
The camaraderie eventually coalesced into a collective web initiative, which took various guises in its early years – including a centralized warehouse for independents to store and share stock. It lasted only a few years, however.
“It was costly, and the volume wasn’t necessarily there,” says Roger Chaar, the former owner of Librairie Moderne in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., who has since sold the business and joined Dumais’s team.
The current iteration of LesLibraires.ca began taking shape in 2015, but it took COVID-19 lockdowns to reveal its true value. According to Dumais, sales spiked 1,400 per cent in the spring of 2020 as support of homegrown online businesses surged. That figure has since come down to earth, but he says that sales are still five or six times what they were in 2019.
The Canadian Independent Booksellers Association also formed during pandemic lockdowns, and its leaders quickly built a rapport with Dumais’s team during some shared lobbying work. The notion of a multilingual, coast-to-coast-to-coast platform kept coming up in conversation.
Laura Carter, CIBA’s executive director, said that “we were really blown away by the success they had in Quebec.” (CIBA also operates a website called IndieBookstores.ca promoting the country’s homespun shops, but it’s a more general discovery platform without centralized shopping.)
Then the LesLibraires.ca crew got a Canada Council for the Arts grant to try an expansion. With CIBA’s help, Dumais, Chaar and their colleagues began making presentations to indie booksellers around the country, taking into account the unique considerations of expanding beyond Quebec, including costlier shipping in some regions and different trends in literature.
When Booksellers.ca launched in February, it was able to offer readers free shipping on orders more than $49. In a world where single hardcovers routinely retail for $40, it’s not a stretch to add a second book; Dumais says 70 per cent of buyers reach the free-shipping threshold.
The nearly nationwide network also gives readers access to a deeper catalogue of books that can be hard to find elsewhere – expanding Canadians’ access to more Canadian stories.
Marnie Parsons, who runs both a bookshop and small publishing house called Running the Goat “on a tiny twisty road off a small highway” in Tors Cove, N.L., said in early March that she’d had only one sale through Booksellers.ca – but is pleased that her press’s titles have another way to find readers.
“Somebody might not order a book from me, but they might realize that a book that we published 15 years ago is still available and order it,” Parsons said. “That would be wonderful.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Booksellers.ca and LesLibraires.ca network has about 10 members. It has about 160 members.