Twenty-three Bookstores
As part of the federal Competition Tribunal ruling on the Indigo/Chapters monopolization of Canadian book selling and publishing, Heather Reisman has been asked to divest herself of twenty-three bookstores, thirteen of them megaStores and ten mall outlets. Unfortunately most of these stores are in parts of the country where nobody reads (areas near malls) or where only a minority of the nearby population speak and reads English (Richmond, B.C.). Part of Chapters corporate strategy was to overbuild stores in order to kill off independent booksellers, so the Tribunal’s ruling is more likely to confirm that the independents are indeed stone dead (while killing off half Canada’s book publishers) than to entice anyone to occupy Chapters reject stores.