Amazon.ca is now well-entrenched in the Canadian e-commerce landscape and seeks to create its own Canadian distribution channel.  The plan requires government approval, which recently led to predictable outcries from the Canadian Booksellers Association.  The CBA wrote to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore - who must decide the issue - to urge him to reject Amazon’s application.  

It argued that Amazon’s entry would "detrimentally affect independent businesses and would raise serious concerns over the protection of our cultural industries. Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote."

The CBA’s attempt to cloak the issue as a matter of Canadian culture is unsurprising, but Moore should recognize this for what it is - a transparent attempt to hamstring a tough competitor that ultimately hurts the Canadian culture sector.

Evidence of the benefits of major retailers to Canadian culture comes directly from a 2007 Turner-Riggs report commissioned by Canadian Heritage on the Canadian book retail sector.  It pointed to a Quill & Quire study that found that consumers were far more likely to find Canadian titles in the large chains than in smaller independent stores.  

Moreover, a second study of sales from eleven small Canadian literary presses found that online sellers represented the largest source of sales growth, while both chain and independent booksellers experienced relatively static sales.

Neither of these findings should come as much of a surprise.  The scarcity of space in brick and mortar bookstores has long been a key concern for Canadian authors and publishers, who fear that their titles might get squeezed off the shelves.  

Big chain retailers alleviated those concerns to some degree by offering up far more space for titles of all origins (though at a cost of greater reliance on those chains and a weaker bargaining position on commercial terms). Online sellers such as Amazon removed the scarcity concerns altogether, since the number of books the company can offer is unlimited.  

That undoubtedly means more competition, yet it also ensures that fears consumers will be unable to access Canadian titles have disappeared.  Indeed, the report concludes "the visibility of Canadian titles - and Canadians' access to them - in online book retail rose significantly with the launch of Amazon.ca and its considerable selection of Canadian- sourced inventory."

In 2000, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage conducted hearings on the Canadian book market.  The resulting report - The Challenge of Change: A Consideration of the Canadian Book Industry - recommended that the government "ensure that no foreign investor is allowed to take over a Canadian firm in the book industry unless credible assurances are made that the investment will increase the availability of Canadian-authored books."

The experience of the past decade has demonstrated that greater retail competition does increase the availability of Canadian books. While the book industry may still require support to bring Canadian books to market, restrictions on who may sell or distribute those books represent a harmful barrier from a bygone era.

The NFB may never replace YouTube in the minds of most when it comes to Internet video, but a series of innovations have highlighted the benefits of an open distribution model and the potential for Canadian content to reach a global audience online.

Last year, just months before the NFB celebrated its 70th anniversary, it launched the NFB Screening Room, an online portal designed to make its films more readily accessible to Canadians and interested viewers around the world.  To meet its objective, it committed to be as open, transparent, and accessible as possible, including making the films freely available and embeddable on third party websites.

In January 2009, the site started with 500 films.  Today, the number of available films has nearly tripled, with almost 1,500 films, clips, and trailers.  The growing selection has been accompanied by a massive increase in audience. There have been 3.7 million online film views over the past year - 2.2 million from Canada and 1.5 million from the rest of the world.  That number is set to continue to grow as daily views have jumped from 3,000 per day in January 2009 to more than 20,000 film views per day in January 2010.

The site also uses mobile technology to increase public access and exposure to Canadian films.  In October 2009, the NFB launched an iPhone application that has been downloaded more than 170,000 times and led to more than 500,000 film views on the ubiquitous mobile device.

Interestingly, the NFB reports the most popular viewing time is in the evening hours, suggesting that watching a film online is an effective substitute for conventional television programming.   

The NFB also rolled out new participative initiatives.  For example, it launched an "open content" project called GDP, an interactive one-year effort to document the economic crisis. The NFB invited Canadians to submit their own videos discussing the effects of the economic downturn, leading to more than 25 videos along with hundreds of photos and text comments.

The NFB success story is noteworthy for two reasons beyond the impressive statistics.  First, the project is instructive from a public policy perspective.  As the NFB’s content manager recently noted, the Screening Room “puts the films back in front of the people who paid for them in the first place - Canadian taxpayers.” 

That philosophy ought to be emulated by other publicly funded cultural bodies. For example, CBC.ca recently began promoting an online licensing system that charges sites as much as $250 per month to embed a single article on a website.  While the desire for additional revenue is understandable, the goal for a publicly funded body surely must be to make public access the priority, rather than to garner small incremental revenues.

Second, the NFB has demonstrated the potential of the Internet and new media to attract new audiences for Canadian content.  The old regulatory models premised on scarcity that led to Canadian content requirements are disappearing quickly, replaced by a world of abundance in which artificial barriers do little to keep content out. 

As the NFB recognized, remaining relevant in that world requires ensuring your work is accessible as possible. While there are unquestionably risks, there are tremendous potential benefits for Canadian creators and the export of Canadian culture.