Indies International: The Challenges of Bookselling in France, Germany, and the U.K.

American booksellers learned about the challenges and opportunities facing bricks-and-mortar bookstores in other countries at the Monday afternoon Day of Education session “Indies International: Bookselling in Other Countries.”

Oren Teicher, Simon Skinner, Franziska Bickel, and Fabrice Piault discussed the state of bookselling in their respective countries.

The hour-long panel discussion, moderated by ABA CEO Oren Teicher, featured Simon Skinner, sales director of Nielsen BookData U.K.; Fabrice Piault, vice editor-in-chief of France’s Livres Hebdo; and Franziska Bickel, owner of the Vogel bookstore in Schweinfurt, Germany, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Retail Booksellers Committee of the German booksellers association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels.

Noting that the U.S. book industry recently celebrated World Book Night — an event that began in the United Kingdom, Teicher said, “We believe that there are opportunities for all of us to learn from one another … about things that have been successful and things that haven’t been.” He then asked each of the panelists to describe the state of bookselling in their respective countries.

Skinner began by explaining that there are two halves to the book market in the U.K. — the online market, dominated by Amazon, and the bricks-and-mortar, High Street market. The online market, he said, “is doing reasonably okay. The High Street bricks-and-mortar booksellers, the independent booksellers, the chains, and the supermarkets selling books are not doing well.” Since about 2006, their business has declined fairly slowly. “There are some positives in some areas, but overall it is a fairly flat market, Skinner said. 

He noted that the end of fixed pricing in the U.K. has had a detrimental effect on bricks-and mortar indies. “It fueled online sales, and gave chain stores and supermarkets the opportunity to discount extremely heavily,” he said. “Independent bookstores were not able to do that for obvious reasons.” As a result, the number of truly independent owner-managed shops in the U.K. has dropped to around 350 - 400.  With the now-slim margins on books, Skinner noted that the “supermarkets which had taken great chunks of the book business are now losing interest in books.” That business, he said, is increasingly going to online retailers. The closing of two chains — Borders and Woolworths, a big children’s bookseller — also had a big impact.

In Germany today, every second book is not sold in a bookstore, said Bickel. And though e-books account for only two to three percent of sales, they are growing. Books in Germany are sold at fixed prices — they are the same price everywhere, “and the prices are set by the editors,” she said. Stores cannot discount, but they can return inventory. “Nearly every little town has a bookshop, and sometimes two,” Bickel explained. In 2000, there were some 5,200 bookstores in Germany; however, last year that number was down to 4,900. But, as ABA’s Teicher noted, it is still an impressive number in a country with a population of approximately 82 million.

Though some of the bookstores closed because they hadn’t kept up with the times, Bickel said, more and more people “are too quick to click on Amazon, and that is becoming a problem.”

In France, where approximately 2,000 bookshops serve a population of about 64 million, book sales have been either flat or down for the past several years, said Piault. There has been a big increase in online sales, but, he added, not as bad as in the U.S. Online sales account for approximately 13 percent of France’s book sales; however, five or six years ago the number was half of that. Supermarkets are an important part of the book market in France, but their market share has decreased from 21 percent to 19 percent. The traditional bricks-and-mortar booksellers’ market share has gone from 25 percent to a little more than 23 percent. The other segment of the French market is multimedia chains.

France also has a system of fixed prices determined by publishers; however, discounting of up to five percent is allowed.

France’s bookstores also receive important support from the government via the Ministry of Culture and from private organizations, including one created by publishers to lend money at no interest to booksellers to develop their stores and to open subsidiaries. Publishers, including most of the large French publishers (most recently with the addition of Hachette), support the association with a small percentage of their profits each year. More than 30 publishers belong to the organization, which has given more than 700 loans to more than 400 bookstores. “There is a form of solidarity among all of the parts of the industry,” Piault said, stressing, however, that it is not a perfect situation.

Booksellers in all three countries are also helped by systems that give them preferential treatment regarding taxes. In the U.K., though there is no direct government support for bookstores, Skinner told the audience, there is no tax on sales of print books, whether they are bought in stores or online. There is, however, a 20 percent VAT tax on e-books, which are classified as an electronic service.

In Germany, print books are taxed at the reduced rate of seven percent; e-books are taxed the full rate of 19 percent.

In France, print and e-books are now both taxed at a lower rate of seven percent. Before a change in legislation at the beginning of this year, e-books had been taxed at 19.6 percent.

Asked by Teicher, what booksellers in the U.K. are doing to attract customers, Skinner observed that the slow decline in the number of bookshops in his country has been countered by the rise of professional booksellers and an increase in the number of shops offering something else, such as a café or a wide selection of non-book inventory. “The rise in the number of bookshops offering non-book has been substantial,” he said. Profitable stores “are finding ways to subsidize, almost, the selling of books,” Skinner said, adding that the old saw “a bookshop is a bookshop is a bookshop” is no longer a sound economic model in the U.K.

Bickel’s Vogel bookstore sells calendars and bookmarks, but she is not a big fan of selling non-book items. The inventory at the country’s big chains, however, is approximately 50 percent books and 50 percent a wide assortment of non-book items. To draw customers, Vogel bookstore hosts a popular series of nighttime events as well as events for schools. The latter bring in many non-German students, who are allowed to borrow books for a month. The school program, which is run in cooperation with children’s book publishers, helps create readers who come back to the store again and again for many years, Bickel said.

In France, bookstores are just beginning to introduce non-book inventory and not many have cafes, said Piault. As is the case in many American bookstores, French booksellers market some books with complementary items, such as a cookbook with oven mitts, or a gardening book with some sort of tool. More booksellers are also working with local libraries and cultural institutions, and hosting author appearances. But these are recent developments, Piault said.

The localism movement is also gaining traction in both the U.K. and Germany. In response to a question from ABA’s Teicher, Skinner said the country’s IndieBound campaign, adopted and adapted from the U.S., “is starting to have resonance with serious book buyers.”

In Germany, Bickel said, a “buy local” movement is starting, as more people recognize that these businesses pay taxes and their employees live in their towns.