What future for independent libraries? This French exception, threatened, faced with the disaffection for the book and the growing market share of the main brands, fights with inventiveness. The famous profession on Saturday 27 Fête de la Livarie Independent, in almost 700 bookstores in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg.
The date corresponds to Saturday near Sant Jordi in Catalonia, a day when we traditionally offer roses and books. In Spain in 2024, he sold 1.98 million pounds that day, a record. In the countries that speak in French, tradition has not yet been established, but the organizers of this celebration work there. Theme of the 2025 edition: “Why aren’t bookstores shops like the others?”
Exceeded by large cultural areas
The signals are really disturbing. In the Biennial study “The French and Reading” conducted in January-February for the National Book Center, in 2025, for the first time since the first edition in 2015, bookstores have passed behind the main cultural areas as a place to buy books. The respondents were 66% to cite libraries and 75% of these main signs of the FNAC type, LECLERC or culture. In 2023, 73% cited booksellers and 69% supermarkets.
“The bookstores are imperfect places, they have gaps in their stock, limits, but a style and knowledge. When there will only be chains, standardized, they will only offer Bestsellers. And if there is a launch alert, that is: do not drop libraries, because it will lose something very important,” he adds.
Without Amazon postponement to bookstores
The market in which this competition develops tends to stagnate, or even in 2025. For an editor who speaks under the cover of anonymity, “the fall in sales on Amazon is not accompanied by a postponement of the bookstores, even if we would like.”
Amazon, who does not want to give any figure, seems to suffer 3 euros of shipping costs in orders of less than 35 euros, mandatory since October 2023. This measure was designed to keep the bookstores network in France. But the profitability is among the lowest retail businesses, according to Xerfi Cabinet figures, in a study in 2024 by the union of the French bookstore.
The profession continues to attract vocations. Philippe Poutou, three times a candidate for the presidential elections for the new anti -capitalist party, occupies one in Bordeaux, the 400 blows. “It is not a book supermarket,” he promised in The new obs. The city of Saint-Martin-en-Haut, between Lyon and Saint-Etienne, 4,000 inhabitants, is also preparing to have its bookstore. Others close, such as the foam of the days in Toulouse, in March. For Dépêche du MidiHis disappearance “feared a cultural desert” in the district of Minimes.
Source: BFM TV
