As fewer and fewer young people are reading, the French cultural establishment (a top-down system which begins at the government level and trickles downward to the publishing houses, the press and the bookstores) are trying to devise ways to make reading appealing. The old-fashioned ways of interacting with a readership are beginning to seem stale. Literature has now been harnessed to the cult of the event, in which it is paired with the other arts – dance, music, drama, film, the visual arts – in order to liven things up a bit…
‘eventiness’ [is] a fetish for the eventfulness of doing something which is not ordinarily ritualized or marked out in any particular way. Think of the Vélib initiative, or Paris Plage, when tons of sand are dumped on the banks of the Seine during the month of August to create a temporary beach. Although this new concentration on the dynamism of the event is by no means the rule, the emphasis is shifting from the silent, solitary reading to the shared, public reading as spectacle…
A search in the Paris yellow pages for ‘bookstores’ yielded 792 results: 101 in the 6th, 100 in the 5th – although these are the traditionally literary neighbourhoods; still there are 63 in the 11th, 28 in the 19th, 36 in the 16th. When you consider that there are only 10 independent bookstores in all of New York City, these figures are astounding…
The law [1981 Loi Lang] stipulates that the publisher has to print the price of the book on the back cover, and retailers are not allowed to offer more than a 5% discount on that price. It is the reason behind the quality of books published and the abundance of independent bookstores in France; it prevents large retailers like the Fnac or Amazon from putting small bookstores out of business; in theory it is also meant to prevent consumers from going to small bookstores to check out a book and then buying it in discount stores or, now, online.
The editor Sabine Wespieser, who owns her own publishing company, says that in the US, houses of her size can only function with the support of non-profit foundations, whereas in France, her books can compete on the market alongside the big publishers."
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 2:38 PM and is filed under bookstores.
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