As tuition and housing costs continue to rise in Atlantic Canada, and as ‘free’ online digital resources proliferate, the price of physical books has become a target of student associations across the region. At SMU, for example, the student association actively promotes a list of “ZTC’ courses that offer ‘Zero Textbook Costs.” What are such programs teaching us about the relationship between the university and small press publishing in the region, especially in minority languages? What is a writer / professor to do when they are torn between a desire to respect / protect the livelihood of essential cultural workers in regional publishing and an equal commitment to increase access to the materials these workers produce? Must we, and our students, pay to be local in the digital age? Or, conversely, must we give the region’s cultural identity away for nothing if we want it to be read? 

Dr. Alexander MacLeod is a Professor in the English Department at Saint Mary’s University and Graduate Director of the Atlantic Canada Studies Program. His research focuses on theories of social space and cultural geography. As a fiction writer, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, the Guardian and the Globe and Mail. A past winner of the O Henry Prize, and the Dartmouth Book Award, his most recent collection, Animal Person, was named a Book of the Year by the New  Yorker, The Irish Times, The Globe and Mail and CBC Books.