Origins

Malcolm Lowry at his squatter’s shack, Dollarton, North Vancouver

Founded in 1987, the BC BookWorld newspaper is the forerunner of the BCBookLook website and the ABCBookWorld public reference site.

As Canada’s largest-circulation, independent publication about books, the quarterly publication has been identified by Dr. Rowland Lorimer, in his report for the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, as ‘the most important and effective element’ in the infrastructure which encourages book publishing in the province with the highest per capita book reading rate in Canada.

It still reaches as many people as possible, with as much information as possible, about as many books as possible, via 650 distribution outlets.

But we live in an increasingy digital age, whether we like it or not.

People are increasingly disinclined to wait for information.

Hence it became necessary to a fashion a new service that can provide news and reviews — and a heckuva lot of other stuff — all immediately available from anywhere on the planet to spread awareness of B.C. books and authors.

Everything on BCBookLook is original. We don’t have interns who cut ‘n’ paste stuff from publishers’ websites and call it content.

We respectfully acknowledge that our operations are undertaken on the traditional, unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skxwú7mesh (Squamish) & səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. It is now considered necessary by some members of society to have a code of ethics. To remain abreast of the times we have provided a Code of Ethics in the ABOUT section of this website.

Rather than be judged by platitudes that are easily produced, we have always been eager to be judged by our track record since 1987 whereby we have extensively represented materials pertaining to First Nations and diversity in every issue. Back issues from 2004 onwards are available via the internet for anyone who wishes to make an extensive evaluation of the preceding sentence [visit https://abcbookworld.com/bc-bookworld-archive/].

— Alan Twigg, founding Publisher

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for the instigation of the BCBookLook.

We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of:

We would not be able to continue operations without the essential ongoing partnership of Creative BC.