Digital Projects

From 1997 to 2002, Coach House embarked on an ambitious and unprecedented project: to put the contents of our frontlist books online for free. Over the course of those five years, we amassed an impressive collection of over 70 unique online books, representing every title we published over that span. Sadly, though, funding for the project dried up in 2002, and it became economically unfeasible to continue publishing the online editions, though we continued to make the existing books available on our website.

Then, a few years ago, talk of ebooks started up again and, quickly, though there were few actual ebooks out there, and little financial incentive to produce them, there were eReaders and Kindles to read them on (and, soon after, Nooks, BeBooks, Cybook Opuses, and eSlicks, among others) and new debates about copyright, formats, pricing and digital rights management. And so we find ourselves back where we were seven years ago, though this time we’re not alone. It’s unclear where this trend is heading – though market share for ebooks is growing every quarter, it isn’t growing across all genres, and the technology isn’t there yet to make all manner of books available to consumers. Many readers and publishers are still resisting the move towards digitization, while some libraries are moving towards exclusively digital collections, doing away with books entirely. Here at Coach House, we think the trend towards digital is likely here to stay, but we don’t believe for a minute that it will mean the demise of the print book. We’ve been strong supporters of digital editions for over a decade now, all the while printing beautiful bound objects on our two old Heidelberg presses. The two delivery methods certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, and we like to think that our readers can appreciate the convenience of the ebook at the same time as the beauty and tactile qualities of a print book, and find a place in their home for both.

Thanks to funding from the Ontario Media Development Corporation allocated through the Association of Canadian Publishers’ Canadian Digital Publishing Services program, we've digitized most of our titles, making them available through vendors like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, OverDrive, Sony, iTunes and Amazon, among others. And of course, you can purchase epubs and PDFs of our titles, DRM-free, from our online store. Visit this page in the future for more news from the digital front.