A Quick Recap: What Happened Before the Acquisition
If you haven't read the first part of this story, here's the short version. Entertainment Book — the thick annual coupon book sold door-to-door by schools and charities across Canada and the US — was a product built for a world where you planned your restaurant visits in advance, clipped physical coupons, and didn't have a smartphone in your pocket.
By the early 2010s, that world was gone. Groupon had taught consumers that deal-finding was instant and digital. Google Maps told you what was nearby. Yelp told you if it was worth going. The Entertainment Book's model — pay upfront in September for a year of coupons you might use — made less sense every year.
Entertainment Publications, the US-based parent company behind the Entertainment Book, filed for bankruptcy protection in early 2013. The announcement hit just as the annual renewal cycle was starting, leaving Canadian purchasers — and the charities that had sold the books as fundraisers — in an uncomfortable position. Were the coupons still valid? Would merchants honour them? Would the 2014 book even exist?
The answer to that last question turned out to be: sort of, for a while.
Full story: Entertainment Book Goes Bankrupt — Really? Yes.
The Acquisition: Someone Thought This Was Worth Buying
Bankruptcy doesn't always mean death. Sometimes it means restructuring. Sometimes it means a buyer sees value that the original owners couldn't extract, steps in, pays off the creditors, and takes over operations. That's what happened with Entertainment Book.
The brand was acquired out of bankruptcy proceedings. The buyers — operating through the established Entertainment brand — believed a few things that turned out to be wrong:
The Entertainment Book had millions of loyal users. Those users had purchased books for years, used the coupons, and identified with the brand. That loyalty was a real asset — it just needed a new delivery mechanism.
The problem was the physical book, not the coupon model. Shift to digital — a website, an app, downloadable coupons — and the cost structure improves dramatically while the value proposition stays the same.
Merchants were still willing partners. Restaurants, attractions, and services had participated in Entertainment Book programs for decades. That merchant network had real value and would transfer to a digital platform.
The fundraising channel — selling through schools and charities — was a distribution advantage that digital deal sites didn't have. Parents buy from their kids' school fundraisers. That behaviour wouldn't disappear.
None of these turned out to be as true as the acquisition thesis required. Here's why each fell apart.
Why "Loyalty" Doesn't Transfer When the Format Changes
Entertainment Book's user base was loyal to a specific experience: the physical book, the ritual of flipping through it, the planning of outings around what coupons you had. That's not the same as loyalty to discount-finding as a behaviour.
When the product shifted to digital — an app, a website, downloadable PDF coupons — the core users didn't follow enthusiastically. The people who had loved the physical book were, on average, older consumers who were already resistant to app-based services. The people who were comfortable with apps already had Groupon, LivingSocial, and a dozen deal alert services in their phones. They didn't need another one.
The "loyal user" turned out to be loyal to the format, not the function. That's a devastating discovery to make after you've already paid to acquire the brand.
Digital Coupons Were Already a Commodity
The second assumption — that moving to digital would fix the economics — missed something important about the state of the market in 2013. Digital coupons were not a scarce or differentiated product. They were everywhere, free, and increasingly automated.
By 2013, RetailMeNot already had millions of coupon codes indexed. Browser extensions were starting to auto-apply discount codes at checkout. Groupon was sending daily deal emails to millions of Canadian subscribers. LivingSocial, Dealfind, WagJag, and Buytopia were all competing for the same merchant relationships.
Into this environment, a newly digital Entertainment Book was offering... a subscription to a curated set of local coupons, with an annual fee, accessed through an app. The value proposition was weaker than free alternatives. The brand name wasn't strong enough to overcome that gap.
The Merchant Network Didn't Hold
Entertainment Book's merchant relationships were real — but they were built around a specific product type. A restaurant agreed to honour a "buy one entrée, get one free" coupon in a physical book that 50,000 local families had purchased. The economics were predictable: some percentage of book buyers would use the coupon, most wouldn't, and the restaurant got brand exposure plus guaranteed traffic from the ones who did.
The digital equivalent broke that model. Coupons could be shared, screenshotted, forwarded. There was no natural limit on how many times a digital coupon code could be used. Merchants who had been comfortable with the physical book's bounded distribution were less comfortable with digital codes that could theoretically reach anyone.
More importantly: by 2013, merchants had already been burned by Groupon-style deals. The daily deal platforms had trained merchants to be cautious about deep-discount offers that brought in price-sensitive customers who never returned. Entertainment Book's acquisition pitch — "we're going digital" — landed in a market where merchants were already questioning whether any coupon platform was worth the margin sacrifice.
The Fundraising Channel Quietly Collapsed
This one is the most Canadian part of the story. Entertainment Books were sold by school children as fundraisers — door to door, to family friends and neighbours, on behalf of their school's parent council. For decades, this was a reliable autumn ritual in suburbs across Canada.
By 2013, that channel was showing stress from multiple directions. Parents were already fatigued by fundraising asks. Neighbours who had bought books for years and barely used them were declining to renew. Schools were shifting to online fundraising platforms that didn't require children to knock on doors. And the bankruptcy had created genuine uncertainty: if you buy a book your child is selling, and the company is in bankruptcy proceedings, will those coupons actually work?
The charities and schools that had depended on Entertainment Book sales as a meaningful revenue source started looking for alternatives — and found them. The fundraising distribution channel, which had been one of the brand's most defensible advantages, didn't survive the bankruptcy intact.
What "Saved" Actually Looked Like Over the Following Years
The acquisition extended the Entertainment Book brand's life by several years. The 2014 book came out. In some markets, digital access was bundled with physical book purchases. An app was developed. The brand tried to position itself as a hybrid — traditional coupons for those who wanted them, digital access for those who preferred apps.
But the trajectory was consistently downward:
The Real Lesson: You Cannot Acquire Your Way Out of a Model Shift
The Entertainment Book story is not really about coupons. It's about what happens when a consumption behaviour changes permanently, and capital tries to buy the old behaviour a few more years of life.
The acquisition was rational on paper. The brand had real name recognition, a merchant network, a distribution channel, and a user base. All of those things had genuine value. But their value was contingent on the original model remaining viable — and the original model was broken not by the bankruptcy, but by the smartphone.
When consumers can pull out their phone and find a restaurant deal in 30 seconds for free, the value proposition of "pay $30 in September for a book of coupons you might use by August" collapses. No acquisition, no pivot to digital, no app redesign changes that. The job to be done — saving money on entertainment and dining — didn't disappear. The specific solution Entertainment Book offered became permanently inferior to what replaced it.
This pattern repeats. Buytopia acquired six daily deal sites in 2013 thinking scale would fix its model. It didn't. Every company involved in that acquisition is also gone. Dealfind merged with TeamBuy. Both are gone. The acquisitions extended their runways. They didn't change the destination.
How Canadians Find Entertainment Deals in 2026
The function that Entertainment Book served — access to discounts on restaurants, attractions, and local experiences — still has demand. The delivery mechanism is completely different.
Restaurant and experience apps (OpenTable, Yelp, TheFork in some markets) now offer deals, loyalty rewards, and last-minute availability discounts that are more flexible and more targeted than any annual coupon book could be.
Credit card rewards and dining programs — the Amex Experiences program, RBC Avion dining offers, Scotia Scene+ — provide ongoing discounts to cardholders at participating venues without requiring any upfront purchase or coupon management.
Costco and membership models survived and grew, because the value exchange is transparent and the savings are reliable. You pay an annual fee, you get consistent pricing advantages. No voucher to redeem, no merchant to convince.
Digital subscription tools now represent the category where coupon-style thinking matters most — AI tools, VPNs, software subscriptions. A verified 30% discount code on an annual plan for a tool you use every day is more valuable than six restaurant coupons you might or might not remember to use. That's what this site focuses on: current verified deals on digital tools →
If You Still Have an Entertainment Book
This question occasionally surfaces in Canadian online communities. The answer, from 2026: no Canadian merchant is obligated to honour an Entertainment Book coupon. The Canadian operations are defunct. Any coupon from a recent book is expired under its own printed terms. Any merchant that might still honour one would be doing so as a gesture of goodwill, not obligation.
If you were a charity that depended on Entertainment Book sales as a fundraiser, there are now better options: online fundraising platforms, local business partnerships, and digital tools that handle the administrative burden more efficiently than selling door-to-door ever did.