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Book publishers in France reported a modest increase in nominal sales last year, buoyed by a rise of 2.6% in book prices as a result of continuing inflation, according to the French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’édition, SNE).
Sales rose by 1.16%, to €2,944.7m from €2,911, in 2022, while the number of copies sold fell by 1.96%, to 439.7m from 448.5m, in 2022. Even so, sales in 2023 rose by 1.1% and 4.9% after taking account of inflation against the pre-pandemic year of 2019, SNE president Vincent Montagne said in his editorial in the SNE’s annual report.
Publishers continued to reduce their output last year as booksellers have been urging for years. The number of new titles fell by 5%, to 36,819 from 38,743, a year earlier and from 37,864 in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak. This brings the total drop in new titles to 18% since 2018, the figures showed. The number of copies printed also shrank by 7.5% to 259m in 2023 from 280m in 2022.
General literature remained the market leader last year, with sales of €627.8m. Despite a 4.3% nominal decline in manga sales, this was followed by graphic novels with total turnover of €466.8m. Children’s books ranked third with a sales increase of 1.9% to €385.4m.
Internationally, French publishers added 3.4% to the number of foreign translation rights sales and co-editions. But the number of contracts with China, the top partner for France for a long-time, continued to slide.
Sales of e-books worth €283m represented 10.1% of total publishers’ sales, while paperbacks apart from manga rose 0.7% year-on-year in real terms because of inflation and lower buying power, the report said.
Montagne, who was elected for his seventh two-year term in office at the SNE’s annual general meeting yesterday (Thursday 27th June), told members that he had three priorities. One is to finalise a good-practice guide for publisher-author contracts, and to introduce a mechanism for mediating author disputes. "In time a law will be needed to implement certain terms of our agreements," he added.
The second priority concerns generative artificial intelligence and the need to "ensure authors’ rights are not sacrificed on the altar of technological innovation regarded by some as an exclusive strategic priority". The third priority is to ensure all actors involved are rewarded on the sale of secondhand books, a market that is growing "exponentially", he added.
Montagne reiterated his opposition to creating a quasi-salaried status for authors and warned against reducing the reach of the Culture Pass for adolescents, doubling VAT on books, rewriting history and restricting freedom to publish. Referring to the French legislative elections on 30th June and 7th July, which the far-right National Rally party is tipped to win, he said: "It is our responsibility to oppose (extremism) with utmost determination".