Indigo Books and Music

My guest today is Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Kobo, one of the world's largest e-book retailers.

Michael was on Kobo's founding team in two thousand nine, operating out of a basement at Indigo, Canada's largest bookstore chain.

Kobo has since grown into a global operation that succeeds by partnering with bookstores everywhere.

He touches on competing with the world's largest tech companies, riding the innovation rollercoaster, and the importance of listening to the reader.

But we stood it up and we got it going and we started shipping books.

Going back to that idea of that independent bookstore in that small town in Ontario, the idea that you could send a book anywhere in the country, in a country that is so far-flung where you have so many people who are spread out across a lot of land, was in a lot of ways the animating principle behind that.

And then we were acquired by Indigo, who's the largest book selling chain in Canada.

Right, so Indigo is like the Barnes & Noble of Canada for anyone-

You can get it, uh, you can get it at Booktopia if you're in Australia.

Uh, you can get it at Indigo Books if you are in, uh, Canada.

You can get it anywhere books are sold.

Um, Jo, any last words you would like to say before, uh, we, we, we close?

Totally.

We used to use the phone book in Saskatchewan.

My gran, he'll tell you this story.

My grandfather, he was a liberal in Brooklyn PEI, and he could tell you every single person and how they voted.

The hardest thing about introducing today's guest is knowing where to start.

She has grown the largest book business in this country and unlike Indigo's only real rival here, continues to sell books in physical stores.

She's a philanthropist and through the Love of Reading literacy program has supported schools, libraries, and millions of kids.

She's an entrepreneur who has started ventures ranging from her own strategy firm to the tech firm Kobo.

It's a funny time to be in business here in terms of kind of the confidence people are feeling, our trade situation.

So just place for us how it feels right now for you as a business leader in this country.

I am happy to share that Indigo is experiencing actually its best time since we started, which is incredible, right? And probably counterintuitive.

And I think a couple of things are going on.

At that point, I never read a book in my whole life.

And I figured I was sitting there at this place called the Read-O-Center, and there was a Chapters, which is a Canadian version of Indigo Books.

And I walked in, and I said, all right, let's look at these books.

And I was so not a reader that my first book was an audio book.

You can find me on Instagram and Facebook, and you can learn more about my work on my University of Regina profile page.

You can get The Chorus Beneath Our Feet in paperback or e-back format on the Radiant Press website, as well as on Amazon, Indigo Chapters, and your local libraries and bookstores.

You can get the audiobook version on all audiobook platforms.

Thank you to On Creative Writing for this opportunity.

And this happened in big, well-known stores.

So Monroe's Books, Walmart, Shoppers Drug Mart, Indigo Books, and all of the big malls in the area.

About 64 of the victims, according to police, appear to be children as well.

And 15 of the videos showed girls wearing school uniforms.

So I reached out to as many victims as I could find and obtained more than a dozen victim impact statements.

So the women and girls who were victims of this case, their names are protected by a publication ban.

But one of the victims I talked to talked to me about how she was filmed while shopping with her family at Indigo Books in Saanich.

And here she is describing how she felt when she saw that video that Chan filmed of her when police showed her later.