More on Communist-Style French Book Pricing

Chad fleshes out a bunch of the details surrounding the French approach to flat book prices:

Although it was never really stated this way, the fixed book price law has prevented France’s noble book culture from devolving into the quasi-cesspool that we have here in the States, where celebrity “books” are stacked miles high and offered for 45% off, and people read a lot of crap (but not always) because it’s cheap and everywhere. Our book landscape is like a 180 to France’s: Whereas the French state that “books are not a commodity like any other,” a huge proportion of businesses and business people in America tend to see them as exactly that—a commodity plain and simple. (A commodity with crappy profit margins, but still.)

As stated above, the goal of the fixed price law was diversity. Diversity achieved by protecting the independent booksellers and independent publishers. Now although there are like 800 “points of sale” for books in Paris (the bookstore count was a number is complete dispute over the course of our trip . . . seemed that every day, someone would cut this in half, from “800 stores! We rock!” to “well, there are really only 400 bookstores“ to “there are maybe 200 real bookstores,” to “we really only deal with the 100 great indies.”), we didn’t actually meet with any indie booksellers during out trip. So, I don’t have a good sense of what the indies actually think about this law, but based on material evidence—like the fact that there are actually independent bookstores that are surviving—I think they’d approve. And that they like competing with FNAC (the major French bookstore chain) on categories such as presentation, selection, ambiance, rather than something so crass as price.

And this is just the start of government regulation and support of the book industry. There are also grants for bookstores and publishers, loans to expand stock, and a new designation for the absolute best stores in France. (More information about all of this can be found in Lauren Elkin’s fantastic article in the recent issue of Five Dials. She’s got all the details in a much more comprehensive way than I can present them here.)

Just to jump on that last point Chad makes, about the Franch government's role in the book industry, that was one of the big eye-openers for me last week in Toronto: the extent to which the Canadian government feels it has a role in the literary marketplace and an imperative to be there. Judging by pretty much everyone I talked to on this issue, the Canadian government feels that it has a job to do to protect and promote Canadian literary culture, said job extending to helping breed the next generation of literature lovers and keep the current generations active. Obviously things aren't quite the same in the free market paradise. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that this wholly accounts for the difference between relative engagements of Canadian, French, and American citizens with the literature available in each country, but I'd hardly say the connection isn't there either.