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The new French Publishers Association president Antoine Gallimard has promised a less costly and shorter Paris Book Fair starting next March.
The Salon du Livre has been contested by some publishers for some time, and Hachette Livre and several others either reduced their presence or were absent from this year’s event.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with the French weekly Livres Hebdo, Gallimard, who is the chief executive of the eponymous publisher, said he was against the idea of taking the fair back to
the Grand Palais in central Paris from the Porte de Versailles on the outskirts of the capital, because it would be "expensive and elitist".
His two priorities for his two-year term at the head of the Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE) are to push through legislation to extend the Lang Law on fixed print books to electronic versions and to create a joint publisher-author royalties collection agency.
He hopes to enlist the support of the Education Ministry to create a day for books and reading in schools, and confirmed that Editions Gallimard, Flammarion and Albin Michel would lodge a complaint against Google during the summer.
A court ruling is expected in the autumn on Google’s appeal in the case brought by La Martinère, backed by the SNE and the French Authors Society (Société des Gens de Lettres).
The book sector is now "at a critical point," Gallimard said. Fears about the impact of digitisation, high print book output and numerous returns risk "a rather crazy spiral that could lead to an implosion".