The publishing sector suffers from confinement. According to data from the GFK Institute released by the professional publication Livres Hebdo, book sales fell 58.5% in volume and 66% in value compared to last year. Since March 16, only part of the sales network has been open: super and hypermarkets, press houses and e-commerce sites. But the activity remains difficult. On Fnac.com, many book references are out of stock. And the delivery times are substantial.
Audio books and digital books are growing, but they represent less than 10% of the global market. It is therefore impossible to compensate for the drop in purchases in physical format.
The extracurricular spared
GFK data shows that the publishing industries are not affected in the same way. For travel books and tourist guides, purchases are at a standstill, with a drop of 97% compared to last year. This segment was already suffering before the containment: between January and mid-March, sales had fallen by 16%, while the borders began to close. The fine art books sector is undergoing the closure of museums (-90%). Other families of books in great difficulty: human sciences (-84%), history (-83%), leisure and practice (-76%).
The comic strip had started the year off very well with an 11% increase in sales between January and mid-March. This growth was cut short with containment: in the past month, purchases have dropped by 69%. The general literature is barely better: -59%, after a start to the year at -4%.
Only one sector was spared by this general dive: the extracurricular. Anxious to keep the children occupied and to continue learning at school, the parents threw themselves on these educational books before confinement (+ 21%). Since then, this segment has been stable, with only 1% decrease compared to last year. Families therefore continue to obtain their supplies from hypermarkets or from websites.
A recovery that looks complicated
The publishing community is now targeting the beginning of the deconfinement, scheduled for May 11. "One of the properties is to reopen bookstores as quickly as possible , " Culture Minister Franck Riester told France Inter on Thursday. Already, some of them, like the Librest network in Paris, allow their customers to order their books online and pick them up on the doorstep of the store. The Strasbourg bookstore Kléber did the same. But faced with the influx of orders, it has given up picking up in stores and now goes by post.
The recovery looks complicated. The publishers have given up their releases in March, April and May, i.e. 5,000 references, to postpone them to an unknown date. Bookstores are now afraid of being overwhelmed by new products, those of spring adding to those of summer or even fall. "If we collectively yield to the panic temptation to postpone the spring titles over the three working months of autumn, accumulated to those initially planned, we would go straight to suffocation and to the crash," warned in Paris Match Olivier Nora, the boss of Grasset editions. "We will have to start from scratch all the programming of our titles over the thirty months following the resumption of activities." Same story with Gallimard, which will reduce by 40% the publication of books until the end of the year.