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Glorious weather did not deter the French from attending the four-day Paris book fair or Livre Paris, which ended last night with a 3% increase in visitor numbers to nearly 160,000 from 155,000 last year.
This was a stark contrast from 2016, when the French were still reeling from the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and stayed away in droves from fairs and other crowd events, but is still below earlier years when attendance bordered on 200,000.
Politics were a focal point this time, with most candidates in the French presidential election to be held in two rounds on 23rd April and 7th May putting in an appearance. The two absentees were the embattled French presidential candidate François Fillon, who faces accusations that his wife Penelope did not do the parliamentary jobs she was paid for, and the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen.
The fair’s first ever Africa stand, representing 12 countries and led by the Cote d’Ivoire, received many visitors and a number of accolades. “This was because it stocked books that are difficult to find elsewhere and brought together many titles that are never displayed together in France,” commented Jean-Marie Ozanne, owner of the bookshop Folies d’Encre in Montreuil on the outskirts of Paris.
Although book sales figures are still not finalised, they were generally claimed to have increased. “We sold more than last year, and on the whole found visitors more enthusiastic this time,” Alain Kouck, Editis chairman and c.e.o told The Bookseller.
Pascal Dulondel, owner of the independent Cosmopolite bookshop in the south-western city of Angoulême, said sales from the two stands he was managing—Hachette Livre’s Le Livre de Poche and HarperCollinsFrance—were 10% higher than last year.
Le Livre de Poche broke its record by selling 18 books to a single visitor, one more than last year’s record. Another visitor, who bought 15 books for the second year running, said they were thrilled with all except one of the titles they had been advised to buy last year, Dulondel said. Not only were new releases in demand this time, but classics almost sold out.
Hachette Livre, which has long been sceptical about the book fair, took a corporate stand for the first time in three years. This was because “a new team is in charge of the event,” said Myriam Simmoneaux, vice-president in charge of corporate media relations for France. For the past several years, the group management has left the individual Hachette publishing houses to decide whether to participate or not, with the result that some do and some do not.
Even though several professionals said they had the impression there were fewer exhibitors than usual, Pierre Dutilleul, director of the French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE), insisted the lineup was stable at 1,200 and included more than 100 first-timers. One of these was the multilingual book platform Bookwitty, which claims to offer 26 million titles from around the world and free delivery in about 150 countries.
The Paris show was also a cue for several protests. Author Maxime Chattam boycotted the fair because the entrance fees of up to €12 were “excessive (…) One pays for books, not access to reading (or only symbolically),” he said in a tweet. Bernard Pivot, president of the Goncourt Academy or jury, agreed. Although attending the fair, the presenter of the former iconic literary television show Apostrophes was quoted as saying that most book fairs are free and that he was “a bit scandalised by charging for access to books, it is not normal.”
The SNE’s Dutilleul dismissed the argument. The critics “are missing the point,” he told The Bookseller. “It is more a festival than a fair. In addition to book sales, there were 800 attractions over the four days, including lectures, debates and workshops, and 3,000 authors signed their books.” The fair “is a meeting point for everyone concerned with books.” Moreover, unlike Brussels, the Paris event receives no government subsidies, he added. More than 22,000 people attended the lectures and debates this year, the organisers said in a statement.
But the debate that was to bring together the authors, publishers and booksellers associations to discuss the future of books was cancelled because participants did not want to air their differences in public and were not sufficiently prepared, according to the online magazine ActuaLitté.
This follows recent articles in other media where Marie Sellier, president of the Société des Gens de Lettres (SGDL), stressed the need to increase authors’ earnings, and improve the transparency of publishers’ accounting. “I have been fighting on both scores for 10 years,” Sellier told The Bookseller. “We have been talking about developing a tool for calculating retail takings on books for at least a decade, and the SNE clearly has the political will to progress on the question.”
The fair was also the stage for protests by librarians and copy editors-proofreaders over working conditions. The librarians demonstrated under the slogan “our jobs are not fake”--a wink at Fillon and his wife—and were led by Grenoble, where three libraries are due to close.
About 30 copyeditor-proofreaders gathered at the fair at the inauguration last Thursday evening and marched along the aisles handing out about 2,000 flyers to criticize the “uberisation” of their profession as more publishers insist on their being self-employed. Negotiations with the French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE) on a new status have been underway since November 2015, one protestor told The Bookseller. “This is extremely slow, but we are slightly optimistic because more colleagues are joining us and we are now thinking of setting up an association to represent us.”
Complicating the issue is the fact that most copy editors-proofreaders work from home for more than one publisher, noted Dutilleul. “But all publishers are aware of the (protestors’) concerns, and want to find a middle ground between a salaried status and total precarity.”
The usual flurry of statistics on books released before or during the fair included the biennial survey by the Culture Ministry’s National Book Centre (Centre National du Livre, CNL), which showed that 84% of French people read books to a greater or lesser extent. Of them, 96% said they read for pleasure, up 3 percentage points from the 2015 survey. The increase was particularly marked for the 15-24 age group, with 89% saying they read for pleasure, compared to 77% in 2015. Market research firm GfK said books remained a pillar of the cultural products market. Sales reported by the retail panel totaled €4 billion or 359 million copies, with e-books accounting for 2.5% and 3.5 % respectively.