Livres Hebdo stops measuring online sales

French trade publication Livres Hebdo has scrapped its monthly distance print book sales barometer, which measured online and mail order sales, as an indirect result of Amazon’s refusal to provide any of its data to market research agencies.
 
This refusal prompted Fnac, the largest cultural product chain in France, to stop separating out online sales in the figures its passes confidentially to Institut+C, the agency that runs Livres Hebdo’s monthly sales barometers.
 
Headlining its article on the move in last Friday’s issue "Liberty, Equality, Opacity,"  the magazine explained that the absence of such an important French retailer means the seven-year-old barometer, the only one in France to provide monthly data on distance sales, no longer held water.
 
The move will make no difference to the global monthly book sales data for France that Livres Hebdo has published for the past 23 years nor to its annual market results, it said. But figures on the country’s online physical book sales will now be the preserve of costly consumer panels and their handful of clients, it added. Sofres releases figures only annually, and the panel that market research firm GfK launched in spring 2013 is "still emerging."
                   
The upshot is that “the unfettered development of major distribution groups [achieved thanks to books] in the name of equality is leading to an opacity that reduces the freedom of other market players, particularly [their right] to information.”