“All of a sudden, we get this panicked email.”
Initially, independent booksellers like Jenn Baerg Steyn didn’t think Donald Trump’s tariffs would affect them.
As the weeks rolled on, that outlook changed. Now, even after Wednesday’s announcement by the United States of wide-ranging tariffs, the owner of Yellowknife Books – the city’s only bookstore – has no idea what is going to happen.
Even though Canada was spared the same fate as many nations in Wednesday’s list of Trump tariffs, the country is already facing a series of US-imposed tariffs and more are threatened. Canada has made multiple moves to retaliate.
The US may not be done. Analysts say more tariffs on lumber may be coming, which could drive up the cost of paper and ultimately affect book prices, even if books themselves are not otherwise impacted.
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The solution may not be as simple as trying to buy Canadian, either.
Take a book like Dying for Gold, the account by Lee Selleck and Francis Thompson of Yellowknife’s Giant Mine strike and the associated fatal explosion at the mine in the 1990s.
Inside the back flap, the book clearly states: “Printed in Canada.” The authors are Canadians, the topic is Canadian. FriesenPress, the publisher, is a Canadian company headquartered in Manitoba.
But the book is distributed by The Ingram Book Company, a large US-based distributor with headquarters in Tennessee.
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What does that mean, if and when tariffs kick in? Might the book’s distributor cause it to feel some effect from tariffs? That’s not clear to Baerg Steyn, who is frantically trying to navigate the new trade war.
She gets help from Ciba, the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association, and from publishers who send updates on how they understand things to be changing. Each publisher may choose to handle a tariff differently, further complicating what each bookseller needs to know.
If a tariff comes in that meaningfully eats into the share of each book sale that Yellowknife Books keeps, Baerg Steyn says the worst-case scenarios would be operating the store on her own or shutting it down.
Take away the books that might be hit by tariffs, and Baerg Steyn estimates roughly half of the books on her store’s shelves would disappear.
“The book industry still doesn’t have any idea – if this goes forward, if it directly affects us – what it will actually look like, because it is such an intermeshed industry,” Baerg Steyn told Cabin Radio.
“Part of the the frustration right now is, assuming it happens, assuming it’s 25 percent, we don’t know when it’s going to roll out. We don’t know what it’s going to look like.
“All we’ve been told is to prepare ourselves – that it could and, in theory, will happen.”
Listen to our conversation with Jenn Baerg Steyn on the Cabin Talks podcast.
You can get the episode on this page, via Spotify or through your podcast provider of choice.
