Book sales recorded a spectacular increase of 19% in 2021 compared to 2019. Very good news for booksellers who say they have felt a burst following the first confinement.
The worst crises sometimes bring nice surprises. The spectacular increase in the sale of books in France in 2021 is one following two years of pandemic. An increase of 19% compared to 2019 according to the National Publishing Union (SNE). “We felt an increase as soon as we left confinement and it remained very spectacular until last June. It was the biggest year I have seen in my life ”, abounds Marie-Rose Guarniéri, Parisian bookseller of Abbesses (18th century), who tempers all the same by indicating a return to a curve “Honest and solid” since September.
The bookseller explains this “startle” of 2021 by the expression of an attachment of the French to bookstores, in particular with the controversy around their designation as “non-essential” businesses during the first confinements. Marie-Rose Guarniéri says she saw customers they no longer saw, hastened to show their support, and increased purchases to prove it. “Purchases of classics, of novels, which in my opinion prove the real attachment of the French to what seems to me to be a fundamental freedom, details the bookseller. There was a realization: the closure reminded people that they needed this closeness to the book. ”
In front of her establishment, at the foot of the Sacré-Coeur, Leona, 72, flips through some children’s books displayed on colorful tables. This grandmother with blue eyes, masked in gray and bundled up in a little winter coat is looking for a new book for her granddaughter, a “Devourer of books”. She also confirms to have read a lot this year, “Surely because I was alone at home”, and because this loneliness weighed on him because of the pandemic. There is also the fatigue of television and its repeated programs.
“I also think that, in this moment of isolation, there was a saturation of other media which made people find a taste for books once more, I would even say a hunger for books which makes it possible to dig deeper, at the same time. ‘inside oneself’, Marie-Rose Guarniéri analysis. The bookseller also welcomes the introduction of the culture pass endowed with 300 euros and available for months for people aged 18 years. According to her, an initiative that has rejuvenated the clientele of her establishment. And even though 80% of pass-related sales were for Japanese manga, the bookseller was impressed by some of the choices: “Art books, beautiful books, things that make you want to read.”
His only regret: the concentration of sales around certain authors. What we can see in the five best sales of 2021 given by the Figaro : in order, Asterix and the Griffin (Albert René), the Anomalies by Hervé le Tellier (Gallimard) who won the Goncourt 2020, two novels by Guillaume Musso, Life is a novel (LGF) and The Unknown of the Seine (Calmann-Lévy), and All the blue of the sky by Mélissa Da Costa (LGF). “We need to give more space to other books, perhaps a little more demanding, to broaden people’s curiosity,” she slips. A perhaps difficult task, but which offers a good prospect following a decade which did not offer a very bright future for the professions of the book.
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