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French publishers and booksellers are up in arms over an agreement with the Education Ministry’s multimedia arm for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to hold workshops in France to promote self-publishing by teachers and others in the education community.
The French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE) greeted last week’s announcement by the ministry’s Réseau Canopé and Amazon with “stupefaction, incomprehension and numerous questions” about a shift in government policy away from open public format, copyright and digital education.
The initiative comes as publishers prepare for a reform of middle schools and the curriculum for all levels of compulsory education from the ages of six to 16 next September.
On 7th March KDP and Réseau Canopé said in a joint statement that the workshops were aimed at “the whole of the education community, including teachers, pupils, students, and parents.” Initially six workshops will be offered free of charge between March and October in six cities: Orleans, Rodez, Lyon, Rouen, Lille and Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe. The partnership will be explained during a round table discussion on Kindle Direct Publishing’s stand at the Paris Book Fair on Thursday.
The French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française, SLF) also lashed out at the plan to allocate public funds to “an American multinational that has made non-payment of taxes in France one of the major pillars of its strategy”, and operates a closed digital system that bypasses the country’s 3,000 independent booksellers. This contradicts the government’s 2012 plan to shore up indies, the SLF said.