Filéas will develop a book sales monitoring portal created for industry players. Authors, publishers and distributors will have personalized access to sales data for their works.
Eight major players in the book industry came together on December 20, 2024 to create the company Filéas (Fils d’information booksellers, publishers, authors):
- the National Publishing Union (SNE);
- the Bookstore Circle;
- Dilicom ;
- the Association for the Development of Creative Bookstores (ADELC);
- the French Librairie Union (SLF);
- the Association of computerized bookstores and users of electronic networks (ALIRE);
- the Permanent Council of Writers (CPE);
- the Society of Men of Letters (SGDL).
Guaranteeing better visibility on sales figures for printed and digital books from authors and contributing to improving the economic and environmental efficiency of the book chain, these are the challenges and reason for being of Filéas.
In order to preserve the general interest dimension of this project and its deeply interprofessional character, the special status of mission company has been adopted for this new structure. A mission committee (composed of equal representatives of the author colleges, publishers, booksellers and institutional partners – Sofia and public authorities) will thus guarantee respect and good conduct of its missions.
More concretely, Filéas aims to develop a sales monitoring tool, via a dedicated portal and in collaboration with players in the profession. The company is thus directly involved in the digital transformation undertaken for several years by the sector with the desire to unite its stakeholders and generalize access to data.
The platform will address:
- to authors who will be able to consult the service free of charge to find out the sales data for their works and,
- to all players in the book chain (publishers, distributors and distributors) who will be able, after subscribing to a subscription adapted to the size of their structure, to consult their sales figures.
To build its bibliographic base, Filéas will rely on the sector’s existing tools by integrating the Electre Authors database on the one hand and the FEL (Exhaustive Book File) data on the other.
The future site will offer two additional sales indicators:
- from its opening, a weekly indicator, built from data collected by GfK, Filéas’ preferred partner;
- secondly, a daily indicator constructed from the sales data of any player in the sector who agrees to provide them. The data will come from more than 700 libraries at startup.
The first part of the future site will be deployed in 2025. It will be presented during the next Paris Book Festival.
During the constituent general assembly, Vincent Montagne, president of the National Publishing Union declared “ This project finds an outcome induced in the author-publisher agreement of 2013. This seems very important to us. It is also a wonderful sign of solidarity for the sector. ».
Chaired by Alban Cerisier, the structure is supported by its director Harriet Seegmuller.
Intense consultation between players in the sector allowed us to create Filéas. This tool has been long awaited, and it will allow each of its beneficiaries to have better knowledge of the sales of their titles. In the future, Filéas will also be a formidable management and decision-making tool, which should make it possible to respond to an important environmental and economic problem in order to better calibrate redrawings in particular. Filéas is an innovative sector project of general interest, which relies on the powerful link which unites booksellers, authors and publishers and on the technical and functional base which the inter-profession has already been able to equip itself with. Thank you to everyone for allowing it to finally see the light of day; together we will develop it.
declares Alban Cerisier.
