Some French bookshops to re-open in May, as indie turnover slumps 94%

Many French bookshops and all other so-called non-essential retailers will be able to re-open on 11th May, nearly two months after they had to close as part of the national lockdown on 17th March.

However booksellers and other non-food shops in shopping centres with a wide catchment area will remain shut, and in some areas stricter rules will apply because Covid-19 cases remain too numerous.

“All shops will have to respect strict (health safety) specifications,” prime minister Edouard Philippe told parliament on Wednesday (29th April). These will include limiting the number of customers allowed inside at any one time, and organizing the traffic flows to ensure a physical distancing of at least one metre.

Wearing facemasks will be recommended for staff and customers when the one-metre distance cannot be guaranteed, Philippe said. But retailers will be allowed to refuse entry to people not wearing them, whatever the layout of the store, he added.

The French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Fran√ßaise, SLF) has prepared a four-page recommended protocol for booksellers that is now in the hands of the Ministry of Culture for consultation, according to SLF director Guillaume Husson. “If we don’t receive an endorsement (or suggested changes) in time, we will distribute it to our members anyway,” he said.

“We welcome the fact that bookshops will be able to re-open,” he told The Bookseller. “But many uncertainties remain.” These include which of the country’s regions will continue to apply stricter rules.

Despite some click and collect and other sales initiatives, French independent booksellers’ turnover plunged 94% between 17th March and 27th April this year and the same period of 2019, Husson said. He was quoting figures supplied by the 255 representative members of the SLF’s booksellers’ observatory.

Hopes are that trade will pick up enough to limit the annual sales drop to 20% or 30%, and that booksellers will not be swamped with a backlog of new titles. Publishers and distributors are expected to cut their summer delivery of new titles by between 15% and 30%. “All publishers are being reasonable for now—some more than others,” added Husson. But he fears that could change at the traditional post-summer rentrée littéraire if the “infernal pace” of new launches is even greater than usual, and particularly if demand is not as brisk as usual.

Temporary financial support from the government and publishers is keeping the country’s network of about 3,000 independent booksellers afloat for the moment. But these measures might not last once the economy gets back into gear, even though the recovery is expected to be slow. The first threat to survival and massive staff layoffs will come this summer, and the next one will follow in the first quarter of 2021, when bookseller expenses are high and sales ease after the Christmas rush, Husson said.