Françoise Nyssen,  in charge of one of the most prestigious French publishing houses has been able to prove that  a policy of editorial quality pays off and is the best option for achieving both popular & economic success.  “We are delighted that this female entrepreneur, deeply rooted in reality and in issues at stake in the book sector will be leading cultural policies in the next years” said SDLC

Read below the SDLC’s press release: 

Le syndicat des distributeurs de loisirs culturels accueille très favorablement la nomination de Françoise Nyssen au poste de Ministre de la Culture.

Françoise Nyssen, à la tête d’une des plus prestigieuses maisons d’édition française, a su prouver qu’une politique de qualité éditoriale était la meilleure option pour rencontrer à la fois un succès populaire et une réussite économique. Nous nous réjouissons qu’une cheffe d’entreprise, résolument ancrée dans la réalité et au cœur des enjeux qui vont définir le futur de la filière du livre, soit à la manœuvre pour les prochaines années.

Fermement ancré dans la filière du livre, aux côtés des libraires, des éditeurs et des bibliothécaires, résolument orienté vers l’Europe, le SDLC saura contribuer à la résolution de ces problématiques : préservation du Copyright, interopérabilité des systèmes de lecture numérique, prêt et abonnement numérique, géo-blocage, accès au livre et à la lecture, entre autres.

Contact SDLC :

Jean Luc Treutenaere (jl.treutenaere@syndicat-sdlc.fr)

L’Assemblée nationale a adopté aujourd’hui une loi visant à encadrer les conditions de la vente à distance de livres. Cette loi, qui doit maintenant être examinée par le Sénat, complétera la loi du 10 août 1981 sur le prix unique du livre.

Les députés de la majorité, ceux de l’opposition, ainsi que le gouvernement, par la voix d’Aurélie Filippetti, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, ont été unanimes à considérer que le cumul de la gratuité des frais de port sans minimum d’achat et du rabais systématique de 5% sur le prix du livre représentait une stratégie de « dumping » visant à assurer aux acteurs les plus puissants de la vente en ligne de livres une position hégémonique sur ce marché et à contourner le prix unique du livre.
Le SLF lutte depuis de nombreuses années contre de telles pratiques qui freinent le développement des ventes en ligne par les libraires indépendants. Il considère que l’adoption de cette loi, en exigeant que le service supplémentaire que constitue le port à domicile entraîne un coût additionnel, va permettre de fixer des conditions de concurrence plus équitables.
Dans le prolongement de son communiqué du 26 septembre (http://www.syndicat-librairie.fr), le SLF rappelle que :

• La politique de « dumping » d’Amazon est financée par l’évasion fiscale : sur les dernières années, ce n’est pas moins d’un demi-milliard d’euros qu’Amazon devrait à l’Etat français ;
• La gratuité des frais de port est un contournement du prix unique du livre ;
• La politique d’Amazon est au final nuisible aux consommateurs et aux lecteurs :

• Ce sont les consommateurs français et les entreprises implantées en France qui financent, par leurs impôts, l’évasion fiscale d’Amazon. Ce que les consommateurs gagnent en frais de port, ils le perdent en impôts.
• Le « dumping » d’aujourd’hui, ce sont les prix chers de demain. Une fois qu’Amazon détiendra un monopole des ventes sur Internet, il imposera ses conditions commerciales aux éditeurs et relèvera ses prix.
• Les librairies de proximité, fragilisées par les pratiques d’Amazon, sont indispensables à la vitalité de la création éditoriale et à celle des villes et des quartiers. Les lecteurs doivent pouvoir continuer à bénéficier d’un large choix de types de commerces pour acheter leurs livres ;
• Amazon cible son combat contre les librairies. Sinon, pourquoi Amazon, qui se dit soucieux de l’intérêt des consommateurs, n’offre-t-il la gratuité des frais de port sans minimum d’achat que sur le livre ?

• Les libraires sont de gros vendeurs de livres de fonds de catalogues. Ils ne se limitent pas à la vente de nouveautés et sont donc frappés de plein fouet par la concurrence déloyale d’Amazon. Les titres de plus d’un an représentent 83 % des titres vendus par les librairies et plus de la moitié de leur chiffre d’affaires. Les titres de plus de 5 ans représentent quant à eux 40 % des titres vendus.

Cette nouvelle loi vient compléter le plan en faveur des librairies engagé et mis en oeuvre actuellement par la ministre de la Culture et de la Communication Aurélie Filippetti. Ce plan, détaillé lors des Rencontres nationales de la librairie organisées les 2 et 3 juin derniers à Bordeaux par le SLF, comprend la baisse de la TVA sur le livre, la mise en place de nouveaux dispositifs de soutien en faveur des librairies indépendantes, financés à hauteur de 11 M€ par des fonds publics et à hauteur de 7 M€ par les éditeurs, ainsi qu’un renforcement du prix unique du livre par l’encadrement de la vente sur Internet et la création d’un médiateur du livre. Par cette mobilisation inédite auprès des libraires indépendants, le gouvernement a considérablement renforcé la politique publique en faveur de la création et de la lecture.

Contact SLF : Guillaume HUSSON
Tél. : 01 53 62 23 10
g.husson@syndicat-librairie.fr

Watch the video here. 

Hazel Broadfoot, President of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland (BA) and owner-manager of Village Books in Dulwich, has kindly shared with us her speech presented at this year's BA Conference on 31 October 2022. Read her inspirational words below.

 

Hello everybody. I’m Hazel Broadfoot and I’m the owner/manager of Village Books in Dulwich. Since April this year it’s been my privilege to be President of the BA. My first experience of bookselling was a holiday job in a local bookshop while I was a student. I knew immediately that I had found my tribe and I’ve been a bookseller ever since. I joined Waterstone’s in its infancy, setting up shops in Edinburgh, and Glasgow, before moving south to work in London branches and to serve on the board. I desperately missed shop-floor bookselling: buying Village Books was an irresistible opportunity and I love going to work in it just as much today as I did when I first bought it.

At last year’s conference, the outgoing President of the BA, Andy Rossiter, stood where I am standing now and reflected on his two years as ‘The Covid President’. I may have breathed a sigh of relief that someone before me had taken that mantle… The prospect of turning the page on Covid, lockdowns, social distancing; the impact on all of our bookselling businesses, was a tempting one. We hadn’t yet fully turned the corner but it was within sight

And when we turned that corner… Never has that supposed Chinese Curse – ‘may you live in interesting times’ – felt more apposite

And yet, here we all are. In the room and online. The biggest self-help group that I know of. The community of booksellers; planning this autumn, planning next year, planning our legacies

And we’re joined by our colleagues from publishing; from sales, marketing and publicity. And by some wonderful authors – all here and keen to support booksellers as a keynote species…

Booksellers are key to the ecosystem of books. Booksellers are the pollinators for new authors; the oxygenators of creativity; the hummingbirds of their communities.

We are more than the sum of our parts; in our own bookshops, as a species as a whole, in our communities and in the contribution we make to breaking out new and undiscovered talent

We punch above our weight and are respected for doing so.

But we need support. We largely weathered the Covid Storm but some of the challenges we face now, could be existential.

Like all retail businesses we desperately need some mitigations from government to help us through the coming storm. And I believe that it is well within the capacity of those within our industry who can, to do the same.

As everyone in this room will be able to testify, the cost of doing business is going up. And up and up and up… Materials shortages, labour shortages, supply chain issues were all impacting us before the arrival of the hyper-inflation of energy and other costs.

Covid provided a massive windfall for trade publishers with huge sales and profits. And my message to publishers is we need your support. Now and through the coming storm.

Support takes many forms:

Many booksellers are extremely concerned about what they see as the diminishing number of reps calling or available to call. Whenever a trusted rep retires there is widespread anxiety among booksellers that they won’t be replaced; that the boundaries will be redrawn and the existing rep force spread more thinly. By definition the magnificent work being done by reps isn’t done under the common gaze of a publisher’s head office. It is being done far away, in bookshops up and down the country. But they are our lifeblood. I spoke about booksellers being key to the ecosystem of books. The relationship with reps is symbiotic within that ecosystem.

Authors too are a key component. I would like to commend Bob Mortimer, not just for being a national treasure but for using his national treasure status and social media presence to highlight bookshops and direct public attention to buying signed editions of his novel The Satsuma Complex from bricks and mortar booksellers, both chains and indies.

It’s been said time and again but why the seemingly thoughtless linking from author and publisher sites to Amazon and only to Amazon? Why? We see the most inappropriate links. Progressive works by progressive writers whose driving principles are a fairer, more equal, more just world… linking straight to Amazon. It just makes no sense. Link to your local bookshop, link to your favourite bookshop, link to bookshop.org, link to Waterstones. Just don’t link only to Amazon

The BA’s annual BAseline report shows us where booksellers’ costs lie. Overheads - including staffing, rent and rates and especially utilities - are increasing.  The vast majority of the goods we sell are books, so we are dependent on our gross margins: any improvement in those margins (on the books we sell?) could go a long way towards offsetting the horrific increases we are facing on utilities and overheads. 

I’m not making a blunt instrument call for more discount but asking publishers to be imaginative. Talk to your bookseller customers, understand what shocks they are facing, remember your Covid windfall and look at creative ways to help mitigate against those bookseller shocks. And remember that a very small gesture from you could have huge significance for a small business and could determine its survival. 
And I do wonder, though my own views on this are decidedly mixed, whether it’s time for a mature debate on whether books should continue to have printed cover prices. I know many people’s eyes will glaze over at the prospect, but almost uniquely among retailers, the price we can sell our main products for is capped by our suppliers. We can price them down, but we can’t price them up. As I say, my own views are mixed and I view the prospect of price labelling 10,000 books in my shop with horror, but while we are thinking about each and every cost in our business and each and every opportunity to maximise profits it may be worth at least a second thought.

One thing I would dearly love to see is the balance of emphasis change in how we communicate to consumers as an industry with more emphasis on the value of books. Because books are wonderful value. And so are booksellers.

On April 24-25, Álvaro Martínez benefited from a bookshop training at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath (UK), where he had the chance to learn the work that lies behind this successful independent bookshop. As part of EIBF’s training, all staff members are encouraged to benefit from this opportunity and get an insight into the daily reality of a bookshop of the EIBF network. Read Álvaro’s takeaways from this placement and how it will enhance his work for EIBF. 

 

Nic Bottomley and his wife Juliette founded Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in 2006, leaving their careers as lawyers to pursue his dream of becoming booksellers. Seventeen years later, Mr B’s has consolidated itself as an example of how dedication and an unapologetically personal approach to bookselling can go a long way.  

 

Amongst other achievements, Mr B’s has been awarded with the Bookseller’s Independent Bookshop of the Year in 2008 and 2011. The bookshop is also the official bookseller at The Bath Festival. Last but not least, the literary preferences of each of the more than 20 staff members finds its place on the shelves, which boasts a selection of around 25,000 books.  

 

I venture myself into the shop—always located on John Street, although it has undergone a progressive expansion in size over the years—where I am welcomed by Nic and Juliette. After being introduced to some of the staff members, and going on a quick tour of the shop, we go to their office space, just across the street. 

 

 

One of the most renowned services that Mr B’s Emporium offers is their bespoke reading subscription system. Through this model, readers are appointed to one of their booksellers, who becomes their ‘bibliotherapist’ for the duration of their subscription (which can last 3,6 or 11 months). This selection is based on the reading interests expressed by the subscriber in the questionnaire they are asked to fill out. All subscriptions are monitored by the staff from an app that has been specifically developed, from which each bibliotherapist can communicate with their allocated subscribers, follow the status of their subscription and send recommendations. Once a recommendation is accepted by the customer, the title is approved for delivery which, due to the high popularity of the service, is shipped directly from Gardners. 

 

Next up, I had the opportunity to join one of the staff members, Tom, in one of the Reading Spa sessions. In a reading spa session, the beneficiary sits down with one of Mr B’s booksellers, having an informal chat about books. Once the customer’s interests are outlined, the bibliotherapist leaves the customer to enjoy their cake and cup of tea and goes on a quest for some books that they think will fulfil their reading likes. Then, the bibliotherapist will introduce the titles to them, leaving the customer to decide which ones to take home. This subscription includes a £60 book voucher, a tote bag and a Mr. B’s mug. 

 

 

 

This session’s customer was Frank, who had just retired from a long career in finance and received the voucher as a gift from his daughter. He also proved to be a true book lover, eager to discover new recommendations from his bibliotherapist and to enjoy them in his recently inaugurated chapter in life. After the session, Frank’s limitless curiosity led him to leave the bookshop with three of Mr B’s tote bags full of books! 

 

 

And just like that, the bookshop opening hours came to an end. I wasn’t the only guest in the shop that day, as the artist Daniela Terrazini spent the day decorating the shop window with a full-size illustration from her artwork for Emma Carroll’s The Tale of Truthwater Lake. 

 

 

Book events are also an integral part of Mr B’s identity, and Nic hosted an interview in the shop that evening with explorer and writer Benedict Allen, who explained some of his adventures around the world to those who joined the event. After listening to some of Allen’s fascinating stories and following a signing session, it was time to call it a night. 

The second day started with a quick session shelving new arrivals. This way, I could get a glimpse of how books are distributed around the shop. Besides arranging books by different sections –fiction, history, children, etc– some other shelves boast staff-curated picks, which reveal the diversity of interests among Mr B’s staff members. 

 

I spent the rest of the morning shadowing Rohan, who showed me how returns are managed. It was fascinating to see how low the return figures were for most of the books in the list –rarely exceeding 2 units of the same title. To my understanding, this is caused by careful attention to book orders, which is proceeded with attention to what titles would suit their audience, rather than relying on national sales charts.

It is worth noting that Mr B’s Emporium uses Batch Returns to track the returns from most of their suppliers, thus simplifying the process and getting a more accurate information on return requests. 

To conclude my training, I joined Nic and event manager Lottie in an organizational meeting ahead of the Bath Literary Festival, of which Mr B’s Emporium is once again the official bookseller. Sitting next to them, I had the chance to go through the list of authors participating in the upcoming edition of the festival, and to get an idea of the criteria used when placing orders for this kind of event. 

With this experience, I had the privilege of exploring first-hand the practicalities and principles of bookselling, and to strengthen the idea that for a bookshop to thrive and stand out, it is essential to work collectively and to have all opinions on board. It was also an honour to share this time with Nic, Juliette and their staff members, who kindly shared their passion for books with me and made of this experience something memorable. 

 

Last 30-31 May, EIBF’s Policy Advisor, Daniel Martin Brennan, spent two wonderful days learning the ropes at being a bookseller at Village Books in Dulwich, London (UK).

It was an early Tuesday morning in sunny and leafy Dulwich Village, London (UK) as I walked into Village Books, a small, quaint, colourful and award-winning independent bookshop that exists since the 1930s and is currently run by Hazel Broadfoot, bookseller and also the President of the UK and Ireland Booksellers Association (BA).

 

I was immediately warmly greeted by Hazel and 3 other smiley booksellers – Tracey, Harriet and Oonagh – who all agreed to guide me through their daily work in the bookshop for the following two days.

I quickly got to work: the Dulwich Festival, where Village Books ran several events, had just ended, and schools were on half-term, meaning children were all on holidays. It was supposed to be the end of a hectic period and we weren’t expecting a particularly busy weekat the bookshop... But as I soon found out, that was wishful thinking!

I spent all morning helping to gather remaining books from the Dulwich Festival and pack them to be returned to publishers. Village Books is small but mighty, storing an incredible number of books in all corners, nooks and crannies! So, collecting them all involved going up and down the stairs and getting up on a ladder to take them down from the high shelves! Unfortunately, there are no pictures of me on the ladder for your enjoyment.

 

These books were being sent back to Gardners, the UK’s main book distributor. As often as possible, carboard boxes and other materials are reused from previous orders. This is a conscious choice from booksellers to be as sustainable as possible. However, there are times where orders are sent in boxes that cannot be reused, which is unfortunate, as it has a knock-on effect on future returns.

After a short break, I joined Oonagh, bookseller and marketing wizard, to discuss all things newsletter and social media presence. Village Books sends out a weekly newsletter summarising new releases and bookseller recommendations – I've already signed up and recommend you do too! The bookshop is also present on all social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok), so there’s something in there for everyone. Shortly after our chat, Hazel joined us to discuss how Village Books can make the most of Bookshop.org, for instance, by curating original reading lists.

In the afternoon, I joined Hazel for a call with a Harper Collins rep, to go through the new titles coming out in July and August 2023. I found it fascinating how Hazel could decide whether to request a copy or not, as well how many. It was a perfect demonstration of the amazing memory, skill, experience and even intuition a bookseller needs to have!

To end the day, I sat with Hazel behind the main desk to go through the day’s orders via Batchline. Looking through some information, including how many copies a book had sold in that year and how many books were left in the store, Hazel could decide whether a book needed to be restocked or not. It was a great exercise on stock management and understanding their own consumers’ behaviour.

Next thing I blinked, and we were already on Day 2! The morning was, once again, busy in the best possible way, as we continued packing books to be returned. It also brought about a new fun activity: unboxing newly delivered books that were ordered the previous day. This required scanning the new books and adding them to the system, setting aside books that were for specific customer orders and finding the right spot for them among the shelves (probably one of my favourite tasks of the ‘job’).

 

 

After that, we had a busy afternoon meeting more reps from publishing houses – first from the children’s publishing house Nosy Crow and then from Bloomsbury. As with the previous, day both reps presented their new books for July and August, and I got to see Hazel once again in action.

The day ended with me observing the fabulous booksellers doing what they do best: chatting to customers, patiently listening to them, recommending the best books and kindly taking their orders.

But before I really finish, I have to make a special mention to a highlight of my training: the constant in-and-out of the cutest four-legged friends you can imagine: Village Books is most definitely a dog sanctuary!

 

I left the bookshop with a handful of books, lots of new knowledge, a renewed sense of security and comfort in knowing that I work representing a unique profession and, most importantly, with a big smile on my face.

See you soon, Village Books!

 

We are hosting a digital panel during Industry Insights track at this year's online London Book Fair 

 

The European and International Booksellers Federation is convening a panel to discuss how the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union has impacted the bookselling industry. While Brexit has been a topic high on the political agenda for a few years now, it’s only since 1 January 2021 that businesses importing goods to, and/or exporting goods from, the United Kingdom encountered tangible disruptions. Focusing on the book trade aspect of this wide-ranging topic, this panel will explore any impacts booksellers have been experiencing and highlight what (if anything) they are doing to mitigate them.

 

How to join?  

The panel will take place on Tuesday, 22 June, during the Industry Insights track on the London Book Fair. The panel will start at 12.15 pm BST / 1.15 pm CEST. and finish with a live Q&A session from 12.35 pm BST. 

Register your participation at this year's digital London Book Fair to join the panel. 

 

Get to know the speakers:

     •     Elda Lamberti, International Sales Manager, Gardners Ltd
     •     Jan Smedh, Bookseller, owner of The English Bookshop, Uppsala, Sweden
     •     Tomás Kenny, Bookseller, General Manager at Kennys Bookshop, Galway, Ireland 
     •     Moderator: Julie Belgrado, Director, European and International Booksellers Federation 

 

Missed the event? 

Read the recap here.