FEP president Pierre Dutilleul: his first interview

Pierre Dutilleul did not hesitate for a second before naming copyright as the top priority for his two-year term as president of the Federation of European Publishers (FEP). 

In an interview at the book-lined café Les Editeurs, in the central Paris publishing district, Dutilleul said reform of copyright in the European Union was already on the table, but that the issue had taken on a new dimension. This is because responsibility for copyright policy is being switched from the Internal Market to the Digital Economy and Society portfolio in the new European Commission (EC), which will take office on 1st November.

Günther Oettinger, who will be in charge of digital affairs, has already told the European Parliament that the reform is slated for 2016, but he has given no details about how he sees the system shaping up. Dutilleul, who hopes to meet him shortly, believes reform “would be useful, provided it is balanced”. 

Outgoing Internal Market commissioner Michel Barnier, Dutilleul’s compatriot, is an ardent defender of authors’ rights and proper remuneration for content creation and, as an author himself, Barnier has a strong grip on the issues. “He is progressive, and shares a number of our convictions,” Dutilleul said. 

Although recognising that the logic of Oettinger’s digital portfolio focus suggests an outlook that favours an unfettered flow of data, Dutilleul is optimistic that explaining in detail the problems facing authors and publishers will “help advance the debate” and bring forth a solution that will satisfy all players. The EC needs publishers to help put the reform together, and Dutilleul is “confident that wisdom will prevail to the benefit of all, including the reading public who are, after all, at the heart of the question.”

Like most in the book industry, Dutilleul—who is also external relations director at Editis, France’s second-largest book publisher—is wary of implied attempts to extend authors’ rights exemptions beyond books and other content for the disabled and certain other humanitarian reasons. 

“If education is also exempted, it would be a disaster for authors and publishers,” he said. “Authors would not be paid enough for their work, and publishers would be in danger as they would not be adequately rewarded for the risk they run on their investments,” he explained. “Publishers are really entrepreneurs, who accompany their authors all the way through from manuscript stage to distribution.”

Educating the pirates

Two threats to authors’ rights are on the horizon: open education resources (OER), or freely accessible educational content; and text and data mining (TDM), or extracting information from machine-read material. “In both cases, it is difficult to see where the beginning would be and where the end would be,” Dutilleul warned. “There is no reason to oppose either for research and education purposes, but I could imagine that both could very quickly be diverted to commercial use.”

He believes that education is also the key to the growing problem of book piracy. “Protection against piracy is just as important as remunerating creation. We need to send a non-aggressive message to the younger generations so that they understand content has to be paid for if it is to remain of a high quality.”

Dutilleul is the second French president of the FEP since the organisation was revamped in 1990. The first was Alain Gründ, the grandson of Editions Gründ’s founder Ernest. The FEP comprises the publishers associations of 28 countries or regions, including three non-EU countries: Iceland, Norway and Serbia. Four EU members remain outside—Croatia, Cyprus, Malta and Slovakia—but Dutilleul hopes to be able to persuade the countries to join. As FEP president, Dutilleul is an observer member of the executive committee of the International Publishers Association (IPA); a similar, reciprocal arrangement exists between an IPA official and the FEP’s executive committee. And the fact that the incoming IPA president, Richard Charkin, is also an ex-president of the UK Publishers Association underscores the strong links between the national and international associations, Dutilleul noted. 

Dutilleul has worked for Editis—in its various incarnations—for an eventful 25 years. The company was originally called Groupe de la Cité, and after a series of takeovers and an asset split ordered by the EC, the outfit was known by half a dozen other monikers before it became Editis in October 2003. It was bought by Grupo Planeta, of Spain, four years later.

Dutilleul’s unassuming manner conceals a combative nature and a determination to fight to the end. “Like the mountaineer that I am, I believe there is a solution to every problem,” Dutilleul says. “I like to debate and to convince, but I always try to be diplomatic. I work hard on my dossiers, and never just skim over them.” 
Other issues high on the FEP’s agenda include interoperability of reading devices and the need for a reduced VAT rate on digital as well as print books. The interoperability question is shifting from B2B (between publishers and retailers) to a D2C relationship (between publishers and the reading public), Dutilleul said. “Consumers now want to be able to read any book in any language on the device of their choice. This is vital in any effort to promote reading, which is a major preoccupation of the book sector in Europe—and probably everywhere else in the world.” 

Dutilleul also intends to push the VAT cause. Although most European countries want a reduced rate on all books, they are charging the full rate on electronic versions, in line with EC rules which stipulate that digital books are a service rather than a cultural product. Only France and Luxembourg have defied that thinking by unilaterally aligning VAT rates downwards, and both countries are yet to find out what penalty—if any—they will have to pay. 

Complicating the problem is the fact that some countries charge nothing or a very low VAT rate on print books, and clearly would resist any attempt to increase the rate in the event of VAT changes which could be imposed across both formats. Another point is that EU countries have to adopt any change in VAT rates unanimously, which is not a given when 28 votes are involved, Dutilleul said. VAT on books is just one thorny question that will land on the desk of Pierre Moscovici, the incoming commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs—and a former finance minister in French president François Hollande’s Socialist government. 

The Amazon issue

Although Amazon is at the forefront of many book professionals’ minds, there is nothing the FEP can do about the problems it presents—at least for the time being, Dutilleul said. The European Commission is conducting a preliminary inquiry into whether Amazon has violated competition law in its e-book negotiations with Bonnier AB, while the German justice system is processing the complaint filed by the Börsenverein (Germany’s publishers and booksellers association), he pointed out.

Before the summer, the FEP canvassed its members to find out whether any European publishers were being pressured by Amazon in a similar way to Hachette Book Group in the US and Bonnier AB in Germany. The answer was no. The UK Publishers Association has detected signs of pressure, but it has reported nothing concrete from its members for the time being, Dutilleul said. 

Although Amazon has recently declared it is a publisher as well as an online retailer, Dutilleul is not sure the US company has the know-how or the corporate environment to succeed durably in the publishing field. The “indispensable and irreplaceable” relationship between publisher and author is central to his argument. That is why the FEP is organising a session of dialogues between authors and publishers, to be held at the European Parliament on 26th November. It will be the fourth year the event has been run. 

This year’s panelists will be author Jonathan Coe and his publisher Penguin; Jérôme Ferrari, who won the 2012 Prix Goncourt—France’s most prestigious literary award—for Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome in 2012, and his publisher Actes Sud; and German poet Durs Grünbein and his publisher Suhrkamp Verlag. In September, the federation organised a lunch in Brussels for MEPs, ambassadors to the EU, and EC officials, to explain the role of publishers. Actes Sud c.e.o. Françoise Nyssen was the speaker, and her arguments for the “necessity of publishers” seemed to strike a responsive chord among the audience, Dutilleul said.