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Sales through French bookshops declined by 0.5% in December from a year earlier.
The figures were compiled by the 160 members of the booksellers observatory, which was created by the French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française, SLF) in mid-2015.
Even though new textbooks were published for the three years of lower secondary school in 2016, the December decline is less negative than it sounds, said SLF director Guillaume Husson, because it follows an excellent performance in 2015, when members’ sales rose 4.2% year-on-year for the month, and 3.6% for the year as a whole.
“Booksellers reported their best year for a long time in 2015, and still continue to hold up well,” Husson added.
Denis Mollat, who owns Librairie Mollat in Bordeaux, the largest indie bookshop in France, said this Christmas produced “no great euphoria” overall. But graphic novel sales rose 10% up in December from a year earlier, and children’s and young adult books rose 8%.
Sales of the 2016 Goncourt prize winner, Chanson Douce (Sweet Song) by Leïla Slimani (Gallimard), were “enormous”, compared with those for the 2015 winner, Boussole (Compass) by Mathias Enard (Actes Sud). “Demand for Goncourt winning titles varies widely from year to year,” Mollat told The Bookseller.
Also on a positive note, Mollat’s online sales were 15% higher last December than the year before, and have increased sharply each month since the site was revamped last August.
Both Husson and Vincent Montagne, president of the French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE), and chairman and c.e.o of Média Participations, said they were concerned about what they perceived was a decline in demand for fiction, but the figures to confirm this are not available yet.
SNE members’ overall sales should be about the same in 2016 as in 2015, Montagne added.