Jerusalem's French bookshop Vice Versa went out of business on Thursday, July 27, when it should have been celebrating its 23rd anniversary a few days later. Its manager, Nathalie Hirschsprung, who took over the store in 2019, has been facing an erosion of sales for two years. "Over this period, I've lost half my customers due to competition from Lireka." This online bookstore targets the two million French expatriates around the world and French speakers by offering attractive prices, lower than Amazon's for similar delivery times.
Despite having received €71,400 in aid from France's National Book Center (CNL) since 2019, Nathalie Hirschsprung also blamed the "absence of significant orders... from French institutions in Israel." With no legislation to protect tenants, she said that if her landlord were not accommodating, she risked "having to pay rent until the end of the lease, in December 2024," despite her bankruptcy.
Marc Bordier, the co-founder of Lireka, finds it "a little easy to point the finger at [his start-up], all the more so as there are many other factors, such as rising rents, staff costs and energy prices... which are affecting all bookstores." Present in Israel for two years, his company "ships book orders there, with a minimum purchase of 50 euros, and includes in its prices Fedex shipping and local VAT of 17 %," he said.
Lireka is backed by the Grenoble bookstore Arthaud, and Bordier knows "how fragile the independent bookstore model can be, and how difficult the competition can be." Israel has become the company's fourth-largest market, after the United States, Canada and France. "Our sales have grown in Israel, but no more than elsewhere," he said.
In the fall, the French Ministry of Culture will be launching a worldwide study of the economic situation of French bookstores abroad, which will allow the CNL to "measure the impact of Lireka on their clientele."
Considered the emblem of the French-speaking world, the French exception and the showcase of French publishing, these French bookstores abroad are suffering from ever-increasing ills: excessive delivery times, higher selling prices than in France, soaring shipping costs and competition from digital platforms such as Amazon and Lireka.
"The means of distribution are still not in place to cope with the economic and geographical constraints we face," said Isabelle Lemarchand, who runs La Page bookshop in London, and is the president of the International Association of French Speaking Booksellers (AILF), which has some 100 members. "Everywhere in Europe, doing this job has become a militant act," she said.
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