A Chat With CBA President Paul McNally

The American Booksellers Association's Winter Institute, which was held in Long Beach, California, in January, drew hundreds of booksellers, as well as other industry professionals, from across the country and from as far away as Canada, Bermuda, and the U.K. Among the attendees was Paul McNally, president of the Canadian Booksellers Association and co-owner of the four McNally Robinson Booksellers in Canada. Bookselling This Week recently had the opportunity to speak with McNally via e-mail about his impressions of the Institute, as well as about some of the differences between Canadian and American booksellers.

Paul McNally

McNally described the Winter Institute sessions, which were designed to present a wide range of programming for booksellers at varying levels of business experience, as "honed, professional, and pragmatic," adding "I was fascinated to see that both new booksellers and experienced booksellers took something away from them."

Noting that panel sessions were "somewhat anecdotal by comparison," he said, "there were always ideas and opportunities to winkle out of the anecdotes. All the sessions seemed to generate conversation, [and the] the inter-session corridor networking seemed to me lively and useful."

While McNally acknowledged that American and Canadian booksellers face many similar challenges, he noted a few issues unique to the CBA membership. "Canadian distribution is very different from American distribution," McNally explained. "In Canada, distribution rights are protected under the Copyright Act: the reasoning is that by holding distribution rights to foreign bestsellers, Canadian agencies can develop the infrastructure to publish Canadian authors. As a policy initiative it has been highly successful -- we win Bookers and even the odd Pulitzer. But it has meant that there is no Ingram in Canada, no B&T. That makes our ordering, receiving, and accounting somewhat different from a typical U.S. bookseller's.

"Another issue is that bookselling, like publishing, has been considered a cultural industry." Referring to the fact that bookstores in Canada must be Canadian owned and controlled, McNally noted, "Most of us think it is a good thing that Borders and Barnes & Noble have no stores in Canada."

McNally also noted some to the ways that ABA and CBA are planning to work together in the future. "We are able to access some of ABA's terrific educational programming, and ABA is working out a way for Canadian benchmark data to be collected via ABACUS. We'd do the work," he explained, but the Canadian study would use utilize the technology and comparative models created by ABA.

"These are good opportunities for us," McNally concluded. "The programs are appropriate to our needs, and we're very grateful. How do we reciprocate? We're promoting membership in ABA to our members." --Interviewed by Karen Schechner