Hey, I thought NAFTA outlawed this! On my desk I have Alan Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence. (Not really. Greenspan will be remembered as a great central banker partly because he was lucky enough to preside over The Age of Moderation -- when communism went away, inflation died, productivity boomed and recessions practically became extinct. But I digress.) On the cover flap is the price -- or I should say, prices: "U.S. $35.00, Canada, $43.50."

For almost forever, U.S. publishers have charged Canadian book buyers more in Canadian dollars than they charged U.S. book buyers in U.S. dollars. Why? The Canadian dollar was always worth much less than the greenback, and the price on the dust jackets reflected this. Now, of course, the Canadian dollar is worth MORE than the U.S. dollar. Takes about $1.10 U.S. to buy a Loonie. But the traditional literary price differential remains. Now, reports the Toronto Globe & Mail, book purchasers, normally a docile lot, are rebelling.

Ever since our dollar achieved exchange parity with the United States on Sept. 20, “books have been under the microscope,” notes Yvonne Hunter, director of marketing and publicity for Penguin Group, one of the country's biggest publishers. And the consumer hasn't liked what he's been seeing. His ire has focused on the discrepancy between what a Canadian pays for an imported, American-made book in this country and what an American consumer pays for that same title, with the two different prices printed right there on the book flap for all to see. The bookstore serves as the conduit for what publishing historian and novelist Roy MacSkimming calls “this predilection for feeling ripped-off. There's been an attack of sticker envy out there.”

The gap between the two prices printed on the inside flap of a U.S. book's dust jacket has been steadily narrowing in the last five years and drastically so in just the last three weeks as the industry heads into the critical holiday gift-buying season – a time that, in some years, has accounted for as much as 65 per cent of the industry's total annual revenue. As one observer remarked earlier this week, “we're saying to the consumer, ‘Don't assume because the last time you went into a store and the prices hadn't been reduced that you should just give up on it and shop south [either by travelling to the U.S. or shopping on-line] or something like that.' ”

If the cheap dollar increases foreign demand for American scribes -- if they become for literature what Bangalore is for software coding -- I'm all for it. Maybe entrepreneurs can make hay out of this: Trucks smuggling cheap Canadian drugs to the United States can be filled with cheap American books for the trip back. (Note to pedants: Yes, I know that a cross-border pricing mismatch is not the same as an export tariff. But it sorta is.)