diff --git a/hsclient/hydroshare.py b/hsclient/hydroshare.py
index 59ef710..8b6c787 100644
--- a/hsclient/hydroshare.py
+++ b/hsclient/hydroshare.py
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
 from contextlib import closing
 from datetime import datetime
 from functools import wraps
+from importlib.metadata import version
 from posixpath import basename, dirname, join as urljoin, splitext
 from pprint import pformat
 from typing import Callable, Dict, List, TYPE_CHECKING, Union
@@ -53,8 +54,7 @@
 from hsclient.oauth2_model import Token
 from hsclient.utils import attribute_filter, encode_resource_url, is_aggregation, main_file_type
 
-import pkg_resources  # part of setuptools
-VERSION = pkg_resources.get_distribution(__package__).version
+VERSION = version(__package__)
 
 CHECK_TASK_PING_INTERVAL = 10
 
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index a3868da..ddf40df 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -15,7 +15,6 @@
         'hsmodels>=1.0.4',
         'requests',
         'requests_oauthlib',
-        'setuptools',
     ],
     extras_require={
         "pandas": ["pandas"],