Got the following email from Christopher Kenneally, of the Copyright Clearance Center, about his interview with Virginie Clayssen Digital Development Manager of the French publisher Editis – the country’s second largest. The interview is available in a podcast and you can find it here. Here are some highlights as set out in his email (blockquotes omitted):
1. On the emerging e-book market in France — “In France the e-book market is just emerging. We are in the beginning, for some reasons I can explain. The first one is we didn’t have in France the Kindle effect, because connected e-readers are just arriving in France. We have one now, but it’s very new.
The second reason is the catalogue of e-books was not very developed. And it’s changing and publishers and digitizing and making books digitally available now, but to begin a market we have to – it’s important to have a consistent offer. It’s just appearing now.
So the third reason is that traditionally in France, distribution is controlled by publishing groups themselves, so publishers also want to control e-distribution. They have built platforms, and there are some platforms in France, and it’s not very easy for bookseller to connect to the different platforms. But I think this year will be maybe the year one of a real market for e-books in France.
2. On why controlling e-book prices matters to French publishers – “French publishers have a law to protect the price of books – of printed books. This law is here from 30 years. But this law doesn’t apply to e-books. So it’s – we’ll have a special law for a unique price of e-books. It’s coming in some weeks. It’s going on now. And maybe publishers were waiting for this law before going to digital very strongly because it’s very important for them to control the price.
But we saw that in U.S.A., publishers also want to control e-books’ price because of the very aggressive policy of resellers about very low prices, and they [the publishers] fought to have the agency model. In France maybe we don’t need agency because we’ll have the law on controlling – publishers controlling price.
3. On copyright & protecting authors’ rights – “European and French publishers are very attached to the copyright… We try with all our organizations, European publishers association and French publishers association, to protect these rights.
There are a lot of fights against it coming from people thinking it is no more a good thing in the digital age, but publishers think it’s very important to protect this. It’s a question of freedom to attach a work to an author and to be sure of this link. And it’s up to authors to decide if they want to share their work. And I like evolutions of some things – for example, Creative Commons and things like this – but it’s up to the authors to decide if they want to use this, and it has not to be imposed to them.
4. On French rejection of the pending Google Book Settlement — “French publishers rejected this settlement for several reasons. One reason is they were not happy with Google digitizing content without permission of right owners. A second reason is to think it’s maybe it’s not a very good thing to have a global library completely controlled by a private company, even if we love this company and we have nothing against Google, but in the principle. Maybe this big, big project to make out-of-print books available for the public has to be managed by public institutions and not by a private company.
There is a real risk of monopoly on orphan works, though we are very sensitive about these questions and we have now a project with French government to build a solution for to make available out-of-print French works, and it’s a big project, and we are hard working on it to do this in the next years.
5. On sustaining French literary life in the digital age – “All the change, in my opinion, is coming from the Web and from this extreme facility to share ideas and to link people together.
And this affects, in my opinion, the way authors are working – that they don’t work the same anymore. They can get information in real time on the Web. They can be connected with other authors. They can be connected with their readers. And we have in France a very active authors’ community on the Web – a literary blogosphere. You can find very interesting exchanges and writings. Authors are blogging in a very interesting way. Some of French intellectuals still are against this and very proud to say, I don’t have a computer, I don’t own a mobile, and it’s the end of the literary life and of the thinking of humanity.
But it’s, I think, it – [that opinion is not] very strong. And it’s not sustainable. I don’t like this idea of the author alone in his room writing and nobody knows what he’s doing. I think we are in a connected world. And you can be very – you can have a very deep thinking and be a real author and also communicate and be linking to – link it to other people.
[We say sometimes this] is like the salon in the 18th century – there is a literary life online – and also in café. It’s – we still have this, yes. And sometimes there are the same people exchanging ideas and trying to share their thoughts online and after that meeting in the real life.
Bio – Virginie Clayssen is digital development manager for Editis, France’s second largest publisher. After obtaining her Master’s degree in Architecture, Virginie Clayssen oriented herself to the field of new technologies and specialized in multimedia. She has worked in the field of video, computer graphics, CD-Rom and Web design. She has also authored two books: “Zoom sur Internet” (1999) and ” Zoom sur les médias” (2002).
In addition, Chris said in his email to me:
I especially liked this comment about French literary life: “We have in France a very active authors’ community on the Web – a literary blogosphere… Some of French intellectuals still are against this and very proud to say, I don’t have a computer, I don’t own a mobile, and it’s the end of the literary life and of the thinking of humanity. But … I don’t like this idea of the author alone in his room writing and nobody knows what he’s doing. I think we are in a connected world… And sometimes there are the same people exchanging ideas and trying to share their thoughts online and after that meeting in real life.”
The French are obsessed with ‘protecting’ their culture against the nasty Anglos. Their market is and will continue to be different to everywhere else, on the whole, and irrelevant to the wider markets.
Well… in fact, in France, we have two devices connected.
not one.
The Fnacbook and the Oyo (the first with Fnac, the other with Chapitre.com)
Kind regards
Nicolas