TAlmost everyone is up in arms against an experiment that will last two years, which is to say an eternity: authorizing advertising for books on television. Most houses like Gallimard are against it. The National Publishing Union is against. The booksellers are against it. Televisions are for it. Rachida Dati too. The Minister of Culture happily sails against the prevailing winds. Each actor plays his card at the hypocrites’ ball.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Anger rises in publishing after the authorization of advertising for the book on television
Add to your selections
Everyone has their opinion on the decree published in Official newspaper on April 6, giving the green light to literary advertising on the small screen. Above all, we hear that advertising for cultural products (books, films, records) benefits those which already sell the best. We hear less that bestsellers help to keep the industry alive in the same way that blockbusters help French cinema thanks to the tax levied on each entry sold in theaters.
Opinions are decided even though there is no quantified study on the literary advertising market and its effects depending on the media: radio, billboards, digital platforms, social networks, written press, cinemas, etc. This list poses already a question: why does everyone have the right to advertise books except television? Why, during the Covid-19 crisis, we saw posters popping up in the street to promote the books of Leïla Slimani, Hervé Le Tellier or Chloé Delaume, and, today, we could not advertise the TV for a best-seller by Marc Levy or the latest Salman Rushdie?
Discriminatory advertising rates
The answer lies in the consequences of television advertising. We have a textbook case with cinema: spots for films on the small screen have been possible since 2020. But the result of this experience divides. According to Rachida Dati, the success is such – increasing attendance, including for “small” French films – that the authorization is now permanent. But a large part of art-house cinema is, on the contrary, surrounded by a shipwreck: films relegated to the shadows, loss of audiences, concentration of the market, risk of standardization of aesthetics.
Everyone uses the numbers in their own way. Rachida Dati, for her part, is now advancing her pawns for the book: a person seduced by an advertisement for a bestseller will buy it in a bookstore and “will leave with three other books under his arm”declared the minister in an interview with Echoes, April 12. The decree will encourage reading. It’s a huge joke, contradicted by dozens of studies. To which is added that, published at the beginning of April, by the National Book Center entrusted to Ipsos, showing a very worrying decline in reading among young people.
You have 55.59% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
