2023-08-05 02:00:06
The French bookstore in Jerusalem Vice Versa closed on Thursday July 27, when it should have celebrated its 23rd birthday a few days later. Its director, Nathalie Hirschsprung, who took over this store in 2019, had been facing an erosion of sales for two years. “During this period, I lost half of my clients due to competition from Lireka. » This online bookstore targets the two million French expatriates in the world and all French speakers by offering attractive prices, lower than those of Amazon for equivalent delivery times.
Despite 71,400 euros in aid paid by the National Book Center (CNL) since 2019, Nathalie Hirschsprung also accuses “lack of orders” significant “French institutions in Israel”. No legislation protecting tenants, she risks, she says, if her landlord is not accommodating, “have to pay the rent until the end of the lease, in December 2024”despite its bankruptcy.
Marc Bordier, co-founder of Lireka, finds “a bit easy to designate [sa start-up] as a scapegoat, especially since there are many other factors, rising rents, staff costs or energy prices… which weaken all bookstores”. Present in Israel for two years, his company there “sends book orders, with a minimum basket of 50 euros, and includes in its prices the price of transport by Fedex and local VAT at 17%”, he explains.
Lireka is backed by the Grenoble bookstore Arthaud, and Marc Bordier knows “how fragile the independent bookstore model can be and how difficult competition can be”. Israel has become its fourth market, after the United States, in the lead, then Canada and France. “Our sales have increased in Israel, but no more than elsewhere”he said.
An audit of French bookstores
The Ministry of Culture will launch in the fall a global study on the economic situation of these French bookstores abroad (LFE), which will allow, specifies the CNL, “to measure the impact of Lireka on their customers”.
Considered as the emblem of the Francophonie, of the French exception or even as the showcase of French publishing, these LFE suffer from ever more violent evils: excessively long delivery times, higher selling prices than in France, skyrocketing transport costs and stiff competition from digital platforms like Amazon and Lireka.
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