FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Toronto, Wednesday, March 5, 2025. There are a lot of questions about the potential impact of the recently-announced tariffs on the retail cost of books, and the answers are not yet known. However, there is already a cost being felt, on both sides of the border. As an independent Canadian publisher representing both Canadian and American authors (and some from other countries too), we are seeing the following impacts:

• some Canadian retailers being unwilling to bring in titles if they have been physically printed and warehoused in the US, even if those titles are Canadian-published by Canadian authors.
• warehousing and distribution partners who regularly do business on both sides of the border are scrambling to determine the logistical and price impacts. For example, some distributors may print perfect bound (paperback) in Canada but the bindery for case laminate or case jacketed (hardcover) has been handled by a US partner. People in those organizations on both sides of the border are spending their time and resources trying to assess and respond to a fluid situation, affecting efficiency.

There are uncertainties in how any new tariffs may be applied and how they may affect retail costs, such as:

• at what stage of the distribution chain will these new tariffs be applied to books that are the product of a Canadian author's intellectual property, published by a Canadian publisher? What about the Canadian titles distributed and printed by US companies such as Ingram or Amazon?
• how will any Canadian retaliatory tariffs affect such Canadian products if they are served either digitally or physically to Canadian customers via American-owned and -based companies?

Canadian publishers, like Ingenium Books, and others in the publishing industry ecosystem will be watching the Canadian government's reported challenge of the legality of these tariffs based on an alleged contravention of CUSMA, still looking for clarity on the details of any such impacts.

Meantime, Ingenium Books is engaged in an outreach campaign directly to Canadian retailers to determine what they need and how we can continue to ensure good Canadian books can reach Canadian readers. We will continue to advocate for our authors and readers on both sides of a border that until recently has been a mutually beneficial and friendly one.

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Tracy Lamourie, Founder, Managing Director, Senior Publicist , LAMOURIE MEDIA
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